I Need To Be Free

• Lily Brincat, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2022

Being trapped in a malodorous jail with one meal every day is what some people have to do every day from now, waiting to be free or waiting for the time to come. Being trapped is the feeling felt by a young girl only 18 drawn to art, she never thought her life would be the same again. This is not the life she had wanted. Decrepit trees surrounded the big bland building and only one shack nearby, no more life for miles away.
This young teen needed to live her life and escape from the one place she called her home for 10 years now because of her culture. Feeling trapped is a horrifying feeling and no one knows that better than me, I am Nala and this is my story.
My mother, the only thing that keeps me going. Sadly, she departed my life. My mum had got taken to die in that shack across from here. We were foolish and treated life as if we saw it every day, but we were happy together.
I have lived 10 years without her and I miss her every day. She is the reason I am still alive. She hid me under a blanket when the guards invaded our house, she got taken and when I looked for her I got taken too. I’d do anything to have her back. “Please give her back to me,” I whispered into the empty pitch black room I had been taken to. So many thoughts flooded my brain.
The choice echoing in my head continuously was should I try to escape and go back to my old life without her or should I stay and be miserable until I am old and grey? I felt stuck. I felt as if I would burst into tears but I pulled myself together and decided to make a decision and so I had hatched a cunning plan, one that I would put my heart and soul into.
Late that night I had escaped the prison through the bars and unlocked the chains pulling me to the ground with a bobby pin I had found at the prison. I also made a pillow out of my ripped pyjamas and tucked the pillows into my bed. When the old clock in the room next door had chimed for midnight I escaped and ran as far as my tiny little non-meat fed legs could go. I had run continuously when my energy ran out and I had stopped. I had entered a lush land with all kinds of animals, even jaguars and toucans.
I had been through this horrific experience, and now it was over.
“If you feel like there is something out there that you are supposed to be doing, if you have a passion for it, then stop wishing and just do it.”