The Gulper

• Alexis Kerr, Grade 3
• Short Story
• 2017

In a swampland far away lives a monster call Gulper and he is not very nice at all! Everyone who got close to him was a goner, he swallowed them up whole. That's why we call him the Gulper. I'm a reporter, named Mia and I happen to live in the swampland where the Gulper lives. Everyone tries to catch him, but it just eats them. Every second week on Monday I go for a walk, and when I see the Gulper, I whip out my sketchpad and draw him and write a short report.
Then I dash back home and send the report off to get published (because everyone wants to read it of course). Some people try to thank me for my lovely reports and when I say try, I mean try.
I live a long way away from town. Every Sunday morning, I ride all the way to the shops in town and grab all the stuff I need. I really do enjoy living in my cottage, not in Warning, which is the town. {I think Warning is a good name for it because everyone who lives there is warned about the Gulper).
If I lived in Warning, it would be noisy because of the cars and the crying. Everyone's crying, because the people eaten whole. Wait a minute, the Gulper swallows them whole! That means they could get eaten and not die! I'm going to find that gulper right now. I should have realised that he swallows them whole, I've been saying it the whole time! I can't wait to save everyone inside the Gulper's stomach. I pack a torch and hot chilli sauce to burn its mouth. As I walk through woods in the swampland ... Argh! I'm suddenly in pitch black.
Rummaging through my backpack, I grab my torch. I hear strange noises underneath me, I turn my torch towards the noise. There are 10 people beneath me.
They all cheered, "Hooray for Mia." I unzip my back pack and hold up the chilli sauce. "Everyone, are you ready?", I say.
"Yeah!", they scream back at me.
I pour the chilli sauce down the Gulper's throat. It roars, the sound is terrible. The next thing, I am running for my life. Surprisingly it isn't chasing us, I turn, the Gulper is playing with the town folk. Cautiously I walk back to the strange scene to see what had happened...
Now every second week, on Monday, the Gulper visits me and tells me what to write in my reports. These days the Gulper is not the Gulper anymore, we call him the Wanderer. We named him that because he wanders around the swampland. The reason the Gulper/Wanderer was chasing and eating us was he thought it was the only way he could be happy.
The Wanderer lives in a cottage like mine, five minutes away from my house. The Wanderer helped me fix up my cottage and make it into a house.
The End.