The mistery of the Gray Lady

Kids screeching, tossing and turning, giggling, ballons floating, faces stained with ice-cream. This is what I see and hear when I go to the park to accompany my Mom and toddler brother. All of a sudden, in the jolly confusion of the park, I see an old lady dressed in gray, pushing a baby-less stroller.


It is so shocking for me to see her, even if I don't know why but to see her blue eyes drift to the ground and children passing her and hitting her makes me want to notice her.


I point her out to Mom. "Hey look at that woman, why is she pushing a baby-less stroller?" At first she tells me that it's none of my business but I can see that she is curious too.


After a few minutes of just sitting there twisting her hands and looking around for my brother Max, Mom gets up and walks toward the old lady. I follow her because I am curious and Max follow us because he doesn't want to be left by himself.


As she sees us walking towards her, the lady gasps and runs away, leaving her stroller behind. As we reach it, Mom pick up a piece of paper that has fallen from it. On it is written: Edward McGregan found D.I.A., May 1944.


I sigh, I guess we'll never solve the mistery of the gray lady.




Just to note, this work is entirely fictional, any refer to actual facts is just pure coincidence. S.V.

Short Book- Part 1

CHAP. 1

BURNT TURKEY AND FAIRGROUND MEMORIES

I hear the birds chirping in the garden as I wake up, with rays of sunshine bursting through the room. I look at my alarm clock, it’s half past eight. I don’t know it yet but today my life is going to change. Things kick off in a calm and relaxed way, just as you would expect from a Sunday morning. In my family we don’t go to church so I can take all the time I want to get dressed and go downstairs for breakfast. As I descend the stairs I hear whistling coming from the kitchen, ‘That’s Dad’ I think. I live with him and my little sister Em from when my Mum left us to go and work in ecological society in an island the Pacific.  I was eight when Mum left us and Em was a few months old, so she doesn’t remember her at all, I try to tell her who she was by showing her pictures and telling her stories, but it’s no use. I kind of do blame Mum for having walked out on us, leaving Dad to cope with a baby and an five-year-old child, I don’t think that even if she was to come here and beg me to go and live with her, I would give up living with Dad to go with her. Dad is the best. Even though he had to cope with raising two young children on his own, he did a very good job and me and Em never complained. He always has this way of making Sundays special. Once for lunch he told us that we could order whichever takeaway we wanted and we chose Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Thai and pizza. We had leftovers for days! I remember of the one time when he took us to ‘The Cheese Melter’, a fantastic place where you can eat as much melted cheese as you want. It was fantastic! Dad is great, he makes me and Em feel special and compared to Mum, who on the other hand stopped sending us presents when I was twelve and sends us one email per year, he’s always been there for us and I wouldn’t change my life one tiny bit. Unfourtunatley life decided to change itself. I arrive in the kitchen and Em comes to greet me, dressed in a fairy frock with a tiara, a wand and wings. I pick her up and whirl her around, the advantage I have, with her being eight and me thirteen, I can look at her and relive my childhood and I also have something to cheer me up when I’m down. If I have to be honest, Em’s life has been much better than mine, she’s popular and nice and she has tons of friends, while I became so shell shocked when mum left us, that I closed up and now I get picked on every day at school and I don’t have any friends. Dad greets me through the kitchen window with a big smile. I hear the sizzling sausages in the pan and the eggs frying. He hauls Em up and she pats him on his baldhead with her wand, saying: “You are a fwog and I’ll make you my pwince”. She always talks like that because her teeth fell out a month ago and they still haven’t grown back yet causing her to not pronounce the ‘’r’’s. He plates up two dishes of ‘’smiley’’ eggs and bacon and hands them to Em and me. We eat up cheerfully and that’s when Dad announces that we’ll be going to the fairground in the afternoon, Em squeals excitedly and I smile too because I have already been there a few times when I was little but I still love to go to there and smell the candied apples and hear the excited screams, it reminds me of when I used to go there with Mum and Dad, when we were still a happy and normal family.

I return to my room to wait until lunch, I turn on my Mp3 player, put in my earplugs and turn the volume up to maximum, Tonight Tonight by Hot Chelle Rae pumps in my ears and fills my head with rhythm, I let it carry my thoughts in the strangest and most obscure places in my head. It’s a bit weird when I close my eyes because I see some precise moments of my life flash by: first my tenth birthday when Brian Cooslings, my best friend then, bought me a copy of The Chronicles of Narnia, which I never read and I still feel guilty about. Then my kiss with Evelyn Sparks in 6^th grade, I remember that her lips tasted of cherry and her breath smelt of bubblegum. The night that I went to see fireworks with Dad and Em by the beach and had a butterscotch ice cream with sparkles and felt the milkyness of it on my tongue and felt the sparkles pop and explode in my mouth, just like the fireworks I was watching. And last of them all, when three week ago Rosy Witherspoon ruffled my brown bangs, re-tied my tie and looked at me with her golden brown eyes and swished her red hair right in front of my nose. I don’t know if I have a crush on Rosy, but I do have a weak spot for red hair. It all started when I was about three or four and Mum had brought me to the park and while I was in my pram I saw a gorgeous red haired woman walking by, wearing a green dress and high heels and sunglasses. And since I was just a little kid with a snotty nose used to seeing middle aged women all the time, I fell in love with her and since then every red haired woman I saw I hoped that it was her. Of course now I am too old to believe that, but I still get shivers when Rosy swishes her hair.

Dad calling me for lunch wakes me from my daydreams, I fly downstairs and sit down on my usual chair, Dad today has prepared turkey, it smells kind of burnt and it doesn’t taste of anything in particular, but me and Em don’t say anything, we eat and smile and laugh because we know that Dad always tries his best and we appreciate his work. The rest of the meal flashes by and before I know it, we’re out of the door, ready to go to the fairground and it’s already 2.30. When we arrive at the fairground, everything is already in full swing and you can feel the happiness buzzing in the air. For a few minutes we just observe the chaos, like watching a storm from on top of the clouds, the quiet before the storm, then we dive into it. We jump from attraction to attraction, we buy candy floss, ice cream and candied apples, and Em actually sticks one in my hair! We go on the merry-go-round, because Em begs us to go, we try winning at one of those “throw the darts game” and “try taking down the tower”, but we fail, then just as we are about to go and buy a teddy for Em, the speaker announces that a new fire show has just opened up in the main tent and Em shouts that she wants to go and see fiwe so we head to the main tent not realizing that we are making the biggest mistake of our lives. The show isn’t really interesting, there’s a guy dressed up as a wizard who lights fire using some petrol and a few combustible materials, but all the little kids, Em included, are attracted to the fire and surround him. After a while Dad’s phone rings and since it’s his sister, Aunty Barbara, he goes outside to take it and I go with him, because I’ve seen enough of this silly show. We are going to realize it just in a few minutes, but Aunty Barbara saved our lives that day. Just as Dad hangs up the call screams start rising for them tent and he races back inside because he wants to find Em. I stay outside but from a little hole in the tent I observe what goes on.

And I see it all happen.

The guy who was doing tricks accidentally drops his fireball on the ground, which is covered in petrol, which spreads the fire and since the tent is inflated with gas, it takes a few seconds for the whole thing to blow up. Thankfully Dad doesn’t manage to get in, even though maybe then he would have saved Em, because the flames have already spread too much, but before running away from the tent, I see my sister screaming in the flames, I see her burn.

When I realize about the gas in the tent I run as fast as I can away from it, leaving the most precious thing I have in there to die, and then I hear the blast, then my mind goes blank.

When I wake up I hear sirens wailing, for a few seconds the world is out of my focus, and then I identify Dad near a policemen and remember… Em, the blast, the blankness of my mind. Just to think that this morning I twirled her around and just now I had to watch her die. Dad comes near me and says:” Thank God you’re all right, I though that I’d lost you too. Listen the policemen say that they don’t know when they will give us results, but, as you can see” and with his hand he shows me the blankness where the tent stood not just long ago, it’s always there, the blankness, right in the middle of my heart, there where Em had been, he continues “ Don’t get your hopes up. Come on, let’s go home”. I nod and he helps me get up, at first my legs feel sore but then I get used to it, lots of journalists want to interview us on what happened, but Dad pushes them away.

Finally when we get home Dad goes to the bathroom, he doesn’t say anything but I know that he’s going to get drunk from the collection of beers that he has under the washbasin which me and Em found three years ago but said nothing about because we knew of the hard times my Dad had had. Just like now.

I go to my room, have a good cry and I don’t even open my schoolbooks to revise because I know that I’m not going to school tomorrow, instead I listen to Wherever you will go by The Calling and fall asleep early.

Just as predicted I don’t go to school Monday, nor the next day, nor the rest of the week. Mostly I stay in my room, sometimes I go downstairs to eat something and find Dad sitting at the kitchen table with red bloodshot eyes and bottle of beer in his hands. I don’t say anything to him. I don’t know what to say to him, I don’t blame him for anything and I know that if I were in his position, having lost almost everything and losing something else, I would behave the same way, but I don’t feel like talking.

On Friday afternoon two policemen arrive on our doorstep, they look sad, but I know that they’re just doing their jobs. They tell us that Em has been proved dead and the reports have entered the national system. Then they ask us how we are coping and that’s when Dad drops the bomb on me. “ I’ve had a good think these past few days” he said “And I was beginning to think that maybe I need some time on my own, after everything that’s happened, I need to think and I need to contact relatives and Josh and Emily’s mother and I need to decide whether to give info on this to the newspapers and I don’t know if I could manage caring for another kid, so I’ve decided: Josh tonight you are flying out to go and live with your mother, I’ll phone her later to tell her what’s happened and to inform her of you arrival so you can go and pack your bags”

“ But Dad I’m not a kid anymore, I can look after myself! Please let me stay I don’t want to go with Mum!” I cry. But he just says: “Josh it out of discussion, go and pack your stuff, I need to cope myself I can’t manage to look after someone else, look maybe in six moths, one year I’ll be ready but for now you are going to live with your Mum.”

And that’s the end of it, the policemen leave I go upstairs to back my most precious things, even if there is one that I can’t pack because she’s not here anymore, wit the words six months one year ringing in my head. At 6.30 Aunty Barbara comes to pick me up for my 9.00 flight. She leaves to travel alone, she hugs me tight and we say our goodbyes. The flight is quite long, 21 hours long because I have to go to the Cook Islands in the Pacific. I arrive there the next day with a massive jet lag and a taxi comes to pick me up from the airport and I arrive in this rural resort. A woman is out front, ready to greet me: “Hi Josh” she says, “I’m your Mum”. 

Just to note, this work is entirely fictional, any refer to actual facts is just coincidental.

S.V.

SNOWED IN

It all started with the storm. I was at school when the storm arrived. It was a snowstorm and everyone was excited about going home and possibly staying home for a few days because of the snow. Except that we didn’t go home.

At about three o’clock the janitor arrived to tell us that the snow blocked the doors, the signal for mobiles was down and that until the snow melted we would be stuck there. This threw everyone into panic. I have to say that I was pretty shocked by this, and this made different thoughts appear in my head, like “Where will we find fresh food?” and “Will there be enough heating to keep us warm for several days?” but most of all “When will we get out of here?”

The problems started multiplying when it came to the sleeping arrangement, because the teachers wanted to make us sleep in the gym but we all knew that the gym was the coldest place in the school at night so they let us sleep in the classrooms. But it was meant for the night to not go well, because when a group of girls went in the bathroom to wash their hands, but no water came out of the taps! Things at this point were thrown into anarchy and we were inside for about ten days and people became savages, hunting down food and water and the teacher’s lounge, the warmest place, was stormed by the popular kids, which were also the main hunters and the other kids had to fend for themselves and live on what was left over. A lot of kids turned into savages and after a while things got so desperate that the popular kids started hunting the other STUDENTS down and killing them and then eating them, I mean things got THAT bad.

Finally one morning we heard the sound of a helicopter hovering above the school and a blinding light came through the roof. A rope was released from the helicopter and we were all pulled up one by one. The helicopter took us to a heliport where different people took us home in snowmobiles and finally we arrived home safe and sound.

Just to note, this work is entirely fictional, any refer to actual facts is just pure coincidence.

S.V.

The Adventures of Adriano

Introduction

Nursery School...

I remember it very well, but I have a very particular memory, this memory is Adriano, a kid that is a year or two younger than me. He was and still is friendly with the kids his age but not with the children my age because we often tortured him but most of the time it was Carla. I don’t want to talk badly about her but she is a bit violent (that’s the only term that comes to mind when I talk about her defects, since she is otherwise such a sweet, gentle and kind person). Throughout nursery school the poor Adriano endured so many adventures that I decided to tell you about some of them: like when we gave him leaves to eat or when we locked him in the little house and threw leaves at him.

Obviously nobody walked away right away because we were afraid that we were going to be punished by the teacher, of course it wasn’t a hilarious show but I think everyone enjoyed seeing him like that; angry and suffering, then we opened the house and went away. I don’t know if Adriano ever told the teacher but I don’t think he did because the teacher never punished us. Luckily, I think Adriano went to XXI Aprile Elementary school but it is still better than Bombicci where we went.

Chapter 1

The Leaf

It was a nice day and everything was calm, if I should start in a way, then I heard a voice that said: “take this leaf it is tomato” it was Carla that had offered Adriano a leaf to eat. Right after that me and Milena got closer and saw that Carla has just put a little sand on the leaf and she said: “look - I’ve put oregano on it”.

Adriano ate the leaf and ran away screaming and crying. 

Chapter 2

The House

It was a lovely autumn afternoon when I heard angry screams coming from the little house in the garden. It was Adriano - he was the only one who screamed like that. 

I got closer and saw that Claudia, Milena and Carla were throwing leaves at him. I went with them for a little bit and did what they were doing, but then I got bored and went away (it wasn’t nice torturing Adriano even if he was younger than us).

Chapter 3

Sand

It was a sunny day and I heard screaming. I hurried over with Michela, Milena and Matilda to see what was going on. We found Carla throwing sand in Adriano’s eyes, then we saw Adriano running away crying. 

Chapter 4

An unexpected meeting

One day at church, I saw Adriano and told Milena and she said: “Don’t tell me about it!” and I burst out laughing. 

Chapter 5

The Final Chapter - The Birthday

One summer afternoon I went to the local park with my Mum and my brother and saw Adriano on his bike wearing a shirt and tie. I smiled and thought that we could meet anywhere. 

THE END