The White Ghosts

• Juliette Croft, Grade 5
• Short Story
• 2018

The sun disappeared behind the strange cloud that seemed to carry a giant canoe beneath it. Jedda had never seen so many canoes that big and she wondered which tribe they came from. “This is perfect, we’ll drop the anchor here!” Anchor? What tribe did the anchor people come from? Then Jedda looked up and noticed that they wore strange clothes. Just then Alinta and Kirra rushed over and said, “They’re invaders - and they’re not people, they’re ghosts, white ghosts!” Thinking rapidly Jedda rushed off to see her mother and father to ask them what was happening.
Whispering to herself, she started running faster than ever, her heart beating nervously. Somehow Jedda found herself deeper in the bush even though her mind was set to go to mother and father. Jedda whispered to herself saying “Go to the beach, go to the beach, go to the beach.” But Jedda’s heart screamed run away. Pressure tugging at her feet Jedda broke down in tears. They burned her delicate face and dropped on the ground. What could she do if she felt so weak and vulnerable.
Wiping her tears away she stumbled back to Kirra and Alinta. As Jedda stumbled up the rocks her sisters ran over and grabbed a hand each. “We thought they’d taken you, by the time we climbed up to the top of the tree!” Jedda smiled at them and they smiled back. They told her they were going to the beach to see what was going on.
Jedda held her sisters’ hands tight, not letting go, whilst they screamed that their bodies were on fire one minute, then cold the next. Jedda too felt her body burn and then freeze. ‘Will Alinta stay with me?’ she wondered. ‘Or will she go with mother?’ Jedda unwillingly looked over to her mother’s body wishing that she was just asleep. What had become of Alinta. Her body was dark but the spots on her skin were as white as the ghosts. Was it possible that she was becoming one of them, was it possible that mother was now one of them? Suddenly Jedda heard her father and Kirra scream “Hot!” Crying she ran to the water and scooped it up in her little model of a canoe and sprinted back to her family. She rushed back and forth until they all said “Cold.” Jedda grabbed her father’s kangaroo skin coat and wrapped it around him, then cuddled her two sisters. Jedda begged them all to stay awake but her father closed his eyes and stopped moving. Feeling hopeless, she asked them to say goodbye to her and when they did, they held her tightly, until they slowly laid back on the ground with a smile on their faces. Jedda cried, her tears pouring over their lifeless bodies. As her tears fell, Jedda felt her body weaken. She collapsed onto the ground, her tears falling more rapidly until she too moved no more.