The Glimpse Of Us - What It Meant To Be "Crazy"

• Hana Wong, Grade 10, Modbury High School
• Short Story
• 2022

Excellence Award in the 'Summertime Fun ONLINE' competition

There was no wrong in loving, no wrong-doing in caring, this was known, but the second I looked in her eyes, and back into his, I knew my love was estranged with hints of blood. Because at this very moment the eyes that were the windows of the soul, lolled lifeless; no singing birds or hazes of clouds. The strangled composition of a man, lay unmoving, and dead. Apples, her favourite, splattered across the man’s body, crimson coloured pools drowned. The girl pursed her lips, because she knew, just as I, that her father was crazy, and that those apples would be left to rot, until the sirens ended, and the handcuffs locked.

“Criminally insane, case closed”.

Love presents itself in many ways, today, it was a violent rainstorm. Pelting hungrily at innocent souls, splattering bullets about, and ravenous, at every man who had no roof. But at the end of the day, unfailingly, there will always be a rainbow, and that? That is love. And that love is now behind bars, struggling to keep its gold far from it, no steel nor diamond pot could stop my little girl flailing with sick.

Worms scuffed my stomach raw, there was no kinship nor home found in the unforgiving. Except now, when she snuggled close, and the moment she laid empty. A stale strain wrought out of her skin, no apple kissed cheeks. All that laid beside me, was a clouded chrysalis of my sweet girl. I felt her red blood cells turn to white, as her lungs drowned beneath the covers, for there could be no breath, under the glaciers that wore her skin.

“Doctor!”

Harps lost their chorus and key, as the insides of my throat folded red. Blood tuned the metallics of my harp. White turned back to red, as seas of red parted before me, letting civilians through to my brain. Their silver linings of painted smiles, and sickly white linen robes. I had lost my daughter, and lost my mind doing so.

My glass lay half empty, as the bone-chilling air chided me instead of my daughter. I found her eyes in the jet black doorknobs, thieves stole her laugh, they stole her courage and spirit, they stole her life. And stole mine.

Love presents itself in many ways, right now, it spoke of clouds. So heavy with hurt, so eager to kill, so ready for blood. To flail with sick, was its way of escaping the unmoving trail of grey. To cry, to shatter glass, to fly. Love stories are always made of the moon and the sun, two things that cannot share the same space. But I don’t want to be the moon nor the sun, today love shall be found within the clouds and the sky. I am a cloud, and she is the sky, and today we will fly together.