War

• Patrick Wain, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2005

They say that there is always something that is made especially for you, always someone or something that you are destined for. As I walk along the beach with Leslie I understand that that point in life might be headed straight at me ready to change it forever.
“I’m going to miss this place,” she says in her strong Yorkshire accent. “Even though I’ve only been here 2 years I will miss it more than England itself.” She turns to me and I look into her deep brown eyes, she is beautiful, the wind is gushing through her long black hair and flecks of sprayed up sea-water hit her in the face making her shine in the early morning sun. “Yourself Robert?” She questions me. I stare at her for a second and then look out to the blue ocean.
“I was born here and I hoped to die here” I answer, “But only the war will answer that one.” Leslie sits down on the greyish, yellow sand still facing the beach and I sit down after her, we both stare out at the sea. I know we are both thinking the same thing, why this and not that? Why hatred and not friendship? Why suffering and not a cure? Leslie and I have been best friends since she came here in 1939, we love each other and we are inseparable. But then just a few weeks later the war erupted and that changed us, it changed everyone and everything. Every country is a diversity of destruction, power and mourning over what kind of terrors have become and what are still to bereave us. Now both of us are going down to the bottom of Australia, the bottom of the world, to Melbourne praying that somehow things will work out. It seems that all you hear are cries of help and wails of anguish, the blast of bombs and whine of bullets. Leslie clutches my hand and leans her head on my shoulder. “If only…” she says, stopping her sentence, I wonder those same words too. They are the center of the world right now. No one wants this, no one ever wanted this, but it has happened and everything happens for a reason. This is where the next words come in. The words that the world is hanging on to in hope that something will get better. I put my hand over her silky hair, stroke it and tell her those very words; “ Only time will tell.”