Here Goes Nothing

• Sophie Lourie, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2022

Instead of making the building look dark and depressing, the incessant rain and hail only made the headquarters of BeyondLife look even more magical. The lightning lit up the windows like an angel from the heavens.
Ryleigh Anthels clung to her umbrella like a lifeline. The wind slammed into the side of her and pushed her hard into the side of the gate. She grunted and rubbed her shoulder in pain. Realising she was suddenly getting rained on, she looked up–her umbrella’s canopy had flung itself over the handle in a desperate attempt to abandon its captor. Ryleigh grabbed onto it and pulled it back the right way. “Gotcha,” she murmured.
The storm slowed down enough for Ryleigh to stand upright without defying physics. She caught her first unhindered glimpse of the edifice before her. She’d read somewhere that it was the tallest building on Earth at 829 metres tall, beating the Burj Khalifa by a mere metre. Of course, she couldn’t be sure if that counted since the BeyondLife headquarters were situated underground and therefore not really on Earth. Still, it was a tall building. ‘I’m gonna be working in this beast,’ Ryleigh thought, with a deep feeling of reverence.
She stepped onto the cobblestone pathway for the first time, relishing every moment. “The Statue of Caeplus!” she gasped, staring up at a giant concrete effigy, at least four times her size, depicting a man leaning on the handle of a magnificent sword with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. “The Great Bear of Prosperity!” she cried, running over to a statue of a bear sitting upon a pile of sapphires. But the most august of them all was The Well. A thing Ryleigh had only ever heard about in legends, its stone bowl housed three poles. The poles each had doors running up and down, which opened into small compartments for the ashes of the dead. This was the job of the Afterliving: to put away the ashes right where they belonged. It amazed Ryleigh that somewhere, in one of these tubes, her own ashes rested.
The Well’s bowl descended deep into the ground, so deep that if you dropped a pebble down it would fall out the other side. Ryleigh decided to test this theory by lugging over a rock the length of her upper arm and chucking it down.
“Sorry, not sorry, European coastline,” she sniggered, dusting off her hands.
“Oi!” yelled a guy from the second-storey window. “Away from The Well, kid!”
Ryleigh considered yelling back that she was nineteen and worked here but she thought better of it. I should probably try to make a good first impression, she decided, sensibly.
Though she couldn’t resist shooting the bloke a pointed look as she climbed the four steps to the main entryway. With an unapologetic smirk on her lips, she turned to face the door.
‘Well,’ she thought, placing her hand on the doorhandle. ‘Here goes nothing.’