I Am Human

• Luke Couzner, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2018

It was a dark night,
Five of us men are held up underneath the floor boards hiding, why are we hiding? Because it is what we have done are whole life. It has always been like this and I don’t know why, I wish I knew why, but I don’t. Here I am, and five other men held up underneath the floorboards hiding scared for our life. This might be wrong, but to me what I am doing is right especially when you don’t have anywhere else to turn, you’ve got to find your own way and that’s what I’m doing. All of a sudden, I hear sirens and men yelling, and through a speaker I hear “stop the boat, you are trespassing on Australian waters.” I hear loud heavy footsteps above us and the sounds of guns going off, I thought I was safe…I thought I would finally live the life a human deserves.
One by one the floorboards on the ship get ripped up and here we are me and the five others sitting in our own feces scared out of our mind getting yelled at, by what I assume to be the Australian Navy. They wrestle us out of the boat and I see the smugglers on the deck of the boat dead, they were murdered. The men in uniforms ask me where I am from, so I tell them. They then proceed to spit on my face and punch me and the others.
They scream at us to get into a little orange life boat and as they say goodbye they laugh. That was the last laugh I ever heard…
I never made it to Australia and I never made it back to where I came from, I died out at sea because they sent us back because of the stop the boat policy. Not only was I country less I am now lifeless…
It wasn’t my country, but it wasn’t their life they were sending back, me and the other men just wanted to live a life that we deserved that everybody deserved. We were refugees and now we were nothing…