The World Of Words

• Clea Auciello, Grade 5, Sylvania Heights Public School -
• Short Story
• 2018

2nd in the 'Horizon of Dreams 2018' competition

The pale-stricken boy dismally strode across a desolate plain; dead and crumbling. His young, but worn hands burrowed through his sandy-coloured hair and came to rest on the metal plate coating the back of his head. The boy paused when his half-robotic foot stumbled over a weather-beaten, metal container poking out from the red soil. His robotic reflexes stopped him from toppling to the hot land, but he detested them all the same.
His fingers shakily withdrew the box from the terrain, pushing bits of crumbing earth aside. The boy sank to his knees and raised the metal lid, sending bits of long-dead grass tumbling downwards. He hesitated mid-lift. Ever since humans had become half-machine, the boy had craved a way to leave his desolate, wasted world behind. Would the contents of this box do that? Deciding suddenly, he wrenched off the lid sending it crashing to the ground with a clang that rang through the lifeless plains.
Inside the box, laid leather-bound objects, yellow with age; they probably hadn’t seen the sun for decades. Slightly disappointed, the boy slowly and carefully removed them from the box, shaking bits of debris off the covers, one by one. He had no clue what they were. ‘Charlotte’s Web’? ‘Little Women’? ‘Animal Farm’? At that moment, a distant memory was evoked. They were books! He had noticed a 5000-year-old paperback at a museum- a painfully boring, 2052 chemistry textbook. Somehow, the boy could feel that these particular works of literature were different.
An invisible force seemed to grasp the boy, dragging his bony fingers towards ‘A Christmas Carol’ and forcing him to prise open the ancient cover. At that point, like a torch switched on in the blackest of nights, the dejected boy’s world lit up as he took in each word. Aided by his camera-like robotic vision, the boy read faster and faster, and in no time at all, he had completed all fifteen novels that had been held within the metal chest.
The boy rose to his feet a little taller than he ever had been and more joyous than he ever had felt in his life. That was it. He could still save his wretched race of semi-robotic humans. The boy, with the newfound strength he had uncovered from those stories, tore every last piece of the robotic armour he had worn all his life, off his flesh. The boy beamed, all human, and gazed triumphantly at the smog-covered outline of his miserable city in the distance. When he had deposited every work of literature back into their metal box of a home, the boy strode towards his forsaken town, his heart filled with hope, to save his people and share the shining world of words that had lit up his life.