Dancing Strawberries

• Hayley Pegler, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2016

There is a street on west side of Brisbane called Dalylock, its nothing out of the ordinary. Just 12 average houses, with different styles of the 1950’s on either side of the road. But this story isn’t of these homes, no, number 25 - the house down the end of road, on the corner of the kerb. This house is, well it’s not normal, and defiantly not ordinary, if anything its quite extraordinary. The house before anything else was built, use to be a farm, with beautiful strawberry fields. But now it’s, well it lays vacant, why? Well because of the towns legend of course! It begins with an elderly lady who went by the name Matilda, it belong to her father and after his passing she inherited it. But you see, unlike your normal strawberry farms this one was different; every night when the sunsets, the fruit would come to life. Crazy right! Well you better believe it, the berries would come together to throw a massive tiny berry festival. Marvelous, spectacular ribbon twirlers, tap dance, ballet dance and Jazz musicians all came together to put on a show purely for their own amusement. It was wonderfully enchanting to hear let alone watch if you were ever so lucky. But how is this possible you ask? The legend has it that the magic isn’t in the soil but in the care takers their very self. Matilda father was told to have been born of magic that passed down through generations, and it was passed down to Matilda. Unfortunately however Matilda did not know of her magic abilities and bared no children either. So now I bet your wondering what happened to all the boogieing berries, well it was said that because Matilda didn’t marry after her passing there was no one to inherit the farm, so as you can assume, the magic hidden within eventually died out ... or so it was said. However if you are awake on the west side Brisbane in Daylock Street late at night. Listen carefully, because I bet you that you can still hear the tiny taps of those twirling twizzling strawberries long into the almost silent night.