Creative Corner

December Issue Prompt:  A Christmas wish list that tells you more about the person who wrote it than they intended.

Submissions can include artwork, comic strips, poems, stories or any other form of creativity. Send them to shane.hunt@education.vic.gov.au to be included in the next issue!

Now....

In a thunderstorm, someone takes shelter under a bridge. An animal scurries past which shouldn’t exist. Against better judgement, they decide to follow it out.

Wiping strings of hair away from my face, I squint through the rain. Literally anything, anything will do. Thunder cracks, louder this time than before. I bow my head against the storm around me, tripping alongside the overflowing river. If I’m right, there should be an overpass ahead that I can hide from the rain under. I take a breath, inhaling rain and the cold and raise my head once more.

Come on… There! A vague shape emerges, and I nearly faceplant in excitement, my foot slipping in a puddle. Fifteen paces, ten, five… I sprint under the bridge, the sound of the storm dulling as I stumble to a stop. I find the highest spot off the path to make my own and pull my knees to my chest, pushing rat-tails of hair off my face as I breath in air and not water for the first time since I got caught by the thunderstorm. Throwing my head back into the stone wall behind me, my eyes find the ceiling and I curse my own bad luck.

It takes me a long moment to realise that something is looking back at me. 

What the.. I jump, and instinctively move along the wall, shuffling across until I’m not directly below… whatever the heck that is. I don’t look back up.

A breath, lightning to my left. One, two: there’s the thunder. God, it’s close. The rain seems to be getting heavier. I breathe. Again. I look over to the spot in the ceiling. 

It’s still looking at me, its neck twisted at the same unnatural angle, only more severe because I moved. I can’t look away from it this time. It blinks at me, so slowly, and I throw my hand over my mouth to stop from screaming. 

Its eyes were yellow before, and now they’re human brown. My eyes are brown. It looks like a crude mix of a rodent and a lizard, sticking to the ceiling but also furry. It’s not a… nice looking thing. A tongue flicks out of its mouth, snake-like, warning me before it moves. And move it does.

It turns its head the right way around and scales the ceiling so quickly I almost lose it, its patchy fur allowing it to blend in with the world made dark by the storm. It crawls down the wall on the left side of me, another flash of lightning illuminating… scales in the bare patches of its back. My hand is still silencing me, and I bite into the flesh of my palm when it turns to look at me again.

What the actual hell is this? It’s still again, appraising me. Apart from its eyes, which are still distinctly human, it has mouse ears and whiskers, and scales on it’s back, tail and legs. I can’t move, and then the thing opens it’s godforsaken mouth, and I lose all semblance of cool I have ever had.

It has human teeth. 

It smiles at me, and scuttles out from under the bridge and back into the storm. I sit there for a moment, my own hand clenched between my teeth. A breath. Another. Again – and I run out from under the bridge, the opposite way to whatever that terrifying thing was.

It catches me, of course. And as always, once it does, I have no choice but to follow it. I just really thought that this time, I’d get away.

Evie Taylor, Year 11