The Great Storm

• Sam Miller, Grade 5, St Mary's School
• Short Story
• 2017

Excellence Award in the 'Spread The Word 2017' competition

Ezra always thought he was made for something. Especially on that dark rainy day. The gloomy bus ride to school started it all. The school was a black-fenced prison. Everybody seemed sad even though they had a raffle on that day, it was just one of those days. As the glum boy strode down the steep path, Ezra spotted his best friend, his friend was kind of an optimist, therefore he was the only person who was happy.
Ezra walked to class with his head down. When he and Liam arrived, the teacher, Mrs. Stoop was already ranting about full-stops and capital letters. The first person to notice the awful shrieking was a freckled boy in the front row. One of the windows shattered and all the paper in the room went flying. A small hand-sized rock found its way into Ezra' s hand. He examined the swirly pattern for a moment and recognised it. Suddenly he ran and Liam followed with his school bag smacking him in the back and their teacher's yells trilling in their ears.
The two boys arrived at a sign down the street with the exact same swirly pattern that the stone had on it. Ezra held up the stone. Then the concrete underneath them opened up.
Sliding and slipping, the boys fell further under the ground. There was an unsatisfying crack, Liam's tablet's screen cracked inside his bag when they landed on a dirt floor. They peered down a long dirt passage with a tiny speck of blue at the end.
After walking for ages, the boys were starving. The only food they had was the small amount of food in Liam' s lunchbox. They sat on a dirt mound with no hope of getting out.
The two boys walked and walked kilometres toward the blue light until their feet finally touched crumbling rock and they emerged. There was before them an entire canyon with the light of the sun bouncing off the rocks. The sun had some sting in it and the boys were thirsty. The mountain of rocks had a temple. Ezra saw a swirl, in a moment he started sprinting again.
When Ezra got to the temple he ran up the stone stairs. Liam was still panting trying climb them. The roof started to cave in and the sky became black and it started pelting down. Ezra raised the stone to a red sandstone with the same pattern. The rock flew out of his hand right into the circle in the middle of the red sandstone.
The clouds disappeared. The sky became blue. The sun shone on the new blue clouds like a diamond. The two boys rejoiced on their way home. In the next couple of weeks the Newshire Herald was filled with the story of the great storm but nobody knew who saved the city except Ezra and Liam.