Heaven Is Made Of Paper

• Portia Johnson, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2020

The sun watched over me with tired eyes, its warmth barely meeting my skin. I wondered at what the sun had seen. I wondered if it had seen them.

Maybe that’s why it was going into hiding.

The world was cooling down, ready to go to bed. The land ahead of me stretched for miles and miles onwards. I wondered what they would say if they knew we walked the same land as them. If they knew that if I walked far enough away from the mud soaked land, we would stand together.

The brown mud crawled up my legs. It was beginning to dry, and it was cracking at each step I took, until an intricate puzzle that fit together perfectly was drawn over my pale skin. A piece of the world trying to sneak into Heaven. Niebosa.

I used to marvel at the days when the snow fell, and I could rush back inside, only to be embraced by the warmth of the fire burning in the kitchen.

When I opened the door, it almost seemed as though I was met with something colder. Yet, my mother was not shivering, or dressed in the warm cotton she so adored. In fact, she didn’t look cold at all.

Maybe it was just because I knew and she didn’t.

I stepped into Heaven. Heaven was guarded by paper thin walls that were beginning to let the Autumn leak in, but stood like soldiers around us regardless. Heaven was small, cramped, dirty, dark, and riddled with hunger and secrets. My muddy shoes left a trail as I walked inside.

Maybe the reason I thought that tiny home on the outskirts of Radomsko was Heaven was because I hadn’t told them yet. Maybe it should be kept that way.

I sat in Heaven and I felt it cracking around me. My mother laid inside Heaven and she knitted, humming gently. I watched her hands move back and forth. She never had the money to learn properly how to knit, but she did it so delicately regardless. The flies moved around, settling themselves on what had been the last of our scraps of food. My father slept by the stove, its flames dancing across his tired skin.

The room felt suffocating. The secret sat on the floor in front of me and looked me in the face, daring me to share it. But how could I ruin Heaven? How could I tear down our plaster guards and let the lines and lies of the world infest a place that was probably the last untouched home on Earth?

The soft tap-tap sound of my mother’s knitting.

The gentle rise and fall of my father’s dream.

The humming tune of the stove singing, trying to warm us all up.

No - I can’t bring myself to disrupt it. They don’t have to know that the world is falling apart in smoke and ashes.

That the bombs fall near here.

That we are next.