Under The Same Sun

• Lonni Miller-metzner, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2018

5:59 am

I can still hear it sometimes, the endless gunshots, and people screaming. I can still see my mother’s eyes closing as she is engulfed by a pile of rubble and debris from a bomb that went off seconds earlier, and feeling a rush of pain in the side of my face, and then nothing…
But that was a long time ago… before I was a refugee coming to Australia… before I was adopted. Everything is different here, I miss the taste of the hot dust, the bustle of the busy streets, the smell of frying Tukhum Bonjan my grandmother cooked for breakfast, and most of all the people I loved, and lost, in Kabul.

6:00 am

I get up and glance at my reflection in the mirror, I’m pretty I guess, with my black hair and big brown eyes. Pretty except for a long jagged scar running from my eye to my chin. The scar which I have lived with since the bombing. The same bomb that took my mother and my life in my home land and… Stop it Dell I tell myself, you’re so lucky to be alive in this wonderful country, you’re gonna be fine. My mother always said, ‘be your own kind of beautiful – a rose can never be a sunflower and a sunflower can never be a rose but that doesn’t mean both of them aren’t beautiful growing under the same sun, always remember that Adella’.

8:10 am

I arrive at school and make my way to my first class, English. English is my least favourite subject, it’s by far the hardest thing about living in Australia. I understand, however when I try and speak, the words won’t come. Answering the teacher’s questions, that’s the worst part, yet the other Year 10 students do it like it’s the easiest thing in the world. A few people tried to talk to me in the first few weeks, but I was too shy and ashamed to talk to them. Ashamed of my scar, my bad English, and just being different in general, how could they ever understand me knowing where I’d come from and what I’d seen. After a while they gave up. Now I’m used to it. The class begins and before I know it, the teacher turns to me and asks, ‘what is meant by the ‘climax’ of a short story Adella?’ I freeze. Suddenly a voice in front of me calls out the answer. The teacher glares at Jasmin, ‘I don’t remember asking you’. ‘Sorry Miss,’ she says with the slightest edge to her voice.
Jasmin turns around, she smiles at me, and, for the first time, I smile back.

Later

This morning, I was dreading school and dismaying in my bad English. Though it was only a smile, I know it’s the beginning of something new. Maybe I will never be a rose, and they’ll never be sunflowers but we’re all beautiful, and we’re all growing together under the same sun.