Dilemma With Time

• Ricco Giuliani-Bruno, Grade 4, John the Baptist Primary School
• Short Story
• 2018

Excellence Award in the 'Write Along 2018' competition

Quickly flicking through his newspaper as the seconds went by, he sat on the wintery park bench whilst no snow fell and the icy bare trees didn’t move. The city air was chilled like the Arctic Ocean and birds chirped, while adults who wore beanies to keep the intense cold off their heads walked speedily to work. It was a cloudy morning and all the tall, brick buildings hugged the people inside because it was very bitter. The people walked briskly on the freezing footpath to avoid the traffic exhaust fumes. When he was finished his newspaper and hot coffee, Bob noticed that the people were still. He stood. Alarmed, he hurriedly checked those around him to see if they were just playing a trick on him.
He realises that they were not playing a trick on him and went back to his apartment. When he got to his apartment, he figured out that he could build a time machine to go back in time to stop the City Mayor from destroying time. It took weeks to build his time machine. He realised that it was still a wintery morning when he looked out the snow filled windows. A few weeks was actually a whole year that had past. Bob moved quietly just in case someone watched him get into the time machine. When he reached a perfect spot, he was pulled in by the time machine and the time machine took him into the past, thirty-four thousand years in the past. It took a short time to get there but to Bob it felt like a very long time. He suddenly realised that he forgot to put in the destination. When he reached his destination that the machine decided on, he arrived on a dry hot desert floor. A dinosaur was looking directly at Bob. His big saliva dropping teeth were smiling at him, not to say hello but to devour him into pieces. Bob had to act quickly and hurriedly put in the correct destination.
When Bob reached his destination, it was the Mayor’s building, he saw him touch a switch which made time stop. He suddenly knew what he needed to do, it was to take the button switch and send it back in time with the time machine for the hungry dinosaur to eat. No one would be able to stop time again. When Bob was finally able to get the time stopping button away from the Mayor without him noticing, he then sent it back in time. Bob told the Mayor and the people of the city, when they finally started to move again, that he was a mad scientist who built a time machine but the Mayor was just simply mad for stopping time. Time cannot be stopped. The seasons come and go and people need to live. The Mayor was just frightened of time not staying still, that his life would be meaningless and he would grow old. The End