Leaving Home

• Ella Mccready, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2019

My name is Liberty Crisp and I am the daughter of Herbert and Alexandra Crisp. Unfortunately my mother died just three months ago and she was pretty much the only person that understood me.

Today is the day that I am leaving London. I have lived here all my life, which really is only 9 years and 236 days. My father decided to move soon after my mother died, so now we are moving to a far away place called Kya Island. I had never heard of it before until about a month ago, apparently it is a small island that is not to polluted by all the factories. My father said that the clean air will be better for children like me. I don’t really mind leaving as the only friends I ever had were the books that I read in the library and at my house.

My father said that air and boat travel is too risky now so we will use the UUTS (Universal Underground Travel System). The UUTS is a tunnel that is made of the strongest metal in the world. Along the tunnel is heaps of food markets and Hotels and heaps of other shops that are necessary and some that aren’t necessary (like Mr Monkey’s Pet Emporium). I had only been through the UUTS once on a holiday to Cheshire to visit our 3rd cousins. I loved the UUTS because there are bullet trains that run along the sides and it only takes you 18 hours to go around the world. Right now I am packing all of my books into my bag so that I can read them while we drive through the tunnel. It takes 13 hours to drive to Saraswati from London but we will be staying at a hotel so it will take two lots of 6 and a half hours.

I hope that I can make some proper friends at Saraswati, I have never had any friends here, they think that I’m weird because I read so much and they just play games on their phones or laptops. We are leaving now, getting into my fathers car, I take one last look at my house, it was just right, but these last three months it has been empty and lonely. My father tries to cheer me up but we both would give anything to have mum back. It may be the last time I ever see London.

I had a dream in the night, it was about the time my mother organised an excursion to the Natural History Museum of Greater Britain, it was the best day of my life. Everything was just as I had witnessed in real life, there were fossils and skeletons and other amazing things that I can't describe. The dream was going well until it came up to the part where there was what was supposed to be the last living butterfly on earth, it was beautiful, nothing like the mechanica that people make. It had silvery wings and a shiny body, it seemed so lonely, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Just then my mother reached out and grabbed the butterfly, it was crushed in her grasp, 'You will never be as pretty as this butterfly once was Liberty, NEVER!', my mother shouted. Thats when I woke up and started to cry.