Just Average

• Nate McQuillan, Grade 6, Bajool State School -
• Short Story
• 2018

Excellence Award in the 'Write Along 2018' competition

The fabrics of reality are not at all stable, like a dandelion caught up in a windstorm. They can be changed, but beware, a minor alteration can become an unbeatable new threat, its unpredictable taunts slowly plunging the multiverse into fathomless chaos. There are many. Hiding in and out of the shadows, using darkness as its ally, madness as its weapon. But there is also the light. The force that drives away the chaos. The force that deafens its taunts. We are the light. We are the saviours. We will prevail.

An out of place shadow. A shadow following me on the way to school. Again. But I’m not scared. The thing is, I’m not your average teenager. It has happened ever since…. that day. The day when my Mother was so engrossed in her friend’s gossip that she let me out of her sight, only for a fraction of a second, but that’s all I needed.

I tore around the back of an abandoned building, knifed around a corner and suddenly, I was in an alleyway, one that I didn’t recognise. Being six years old, I didn’t know what to think. Then, a few minutes later, sounds disturbed my frantic crying. Voices. I crept over to a small garbage can. More voices. I listened hard. I searched for an opening. Not one. In frustration, I kicked aside the bin. It fell away, revealing a narrow passageway, fit for a plague of large rodents. I struggled through, only wanting to get away from lost hope. The passageway opened up into a large room. I heard eerie sounds coming from the corner, too despicable to comprehend. My head turned. A figure shrouded in misted grey. Feasting. Feasting on my mother’s fresh corpse. “Mommy?” I whimper, even though, deep in my bones, bones filled with regret, I know that Mommy…isn’t living.

I watched it slowly sink its claws into her flesh, flesh barely attached to her carcass, teeth tearing chunks of succulent meat into jaws. God, those jaws! Spittle spurting out of blood-soaked cavities in teeth so grotesque they could kill a cockroach. The hinged chin worked agonisingly slow, as if trying to savour the moment. Its tongue was black. Its lips white with cold. Holes crawled up the monster’s face, rotten like fermenting fruit. Its head swiveled around so its glistening eyes, eyes with starvation, locked on mine. It roared. I felt a peculiar sensation, like a needle being pushed into my skin. Then, a blinding light appeared. I felt the needle being pulled out. I don’t remember much after that…

When I woke, I saw three strange stranded figures, cloaked in the purest of white, studying me. A woman bent over. “Do you know who the monster was?” she said. I shook my head. The figures shared a glance. “There…. was a change in time! That was the…. consequence of our…actions,” she said

Like, I said, I’m not your average teenager…