Year 7 English - 

Short Story Writing Competition

Hard Rubbish 

I took a breath outside as it was a refreshing morning in Watterfork, the birds were chirping, and the sky was blue, I drank my coffee and relaxed. Around an hour went by when I realised it was 10:30am and the neighbours still hadn’t woken up and come past to say hi, so I got a bit confused. Every morning I’d wake to a “Hi Ms. Karl” by the neighbours, however this morning was different, in fact very different.  

It started to get later in the day, and they still hadn’t come by, so I took a stroll down to their house. When I arrived, I noticed the house wasn’t in its usual appearance then I realised, the car was gone and there was a for sale sign in front of the mailbox. I started to run around in circles as I didn’t hear any moving trucks and didn’t see any either, so I sat down and thought ‘Why are they gone?” Many thoughts came to mind, was the house was haunted? Maybe the house was too small. 

I kept thinking when the stench of rotten animals and food filled my nose I began to gag and tried to figure out what that smell was. I walked to the curb of where the house was and saw three rubbish bags with goo leaking from then, I started to tear up as the stench burned my eyes, I wiped my eyes and stepped on something. It was a shovel that looked new but was dirty and seemed to have something attached to it. It was a unicorn toy with one leg that had been ripped out. It all started to creep me out, so I took a photo of it all and ran home.  

When I arrived home, I sat down and thought “What is all this stuff and why it was all on the curb?” I thought of many things, but they all sounded too unreal when I finally thought of one thing, “They must have just left the house and put it up for sale to get some money for their child Polly”. They loved her so much, but she did tend to be a bit strange every now and then. I thought it was just her being herself. It started to get a bit late, and I went back to the house to check if the stuff was still all there, and it was. I started to get a bit teary as I missed having them saying hi to me, so I looked at a recent photo of Polly I took for Christmas. I saw she was holding a unicorn toy with one leg missing and then it clicked. The unicorn on the curb was hers, so I picked it up and put it on the for-sale sign so if the parents came by to see if the house had been sold, they would see the unicorn and pick it up.  

Three months went by, and the unicorn stayed there and hadn’t moved, not one inch. All this started to scare me, I thought maybe the goo was Polly’s insides, but I quickly chucked the thought out my head as it seemed impossible, but then the shovel had a bit of goo and dirt on it, so I thought “they might’ve collected her insides and put her body in the dirt. That’s why they left the unicorn on curb, so they didn’t have to remember Polly”. It all sounded to unrealistic but so true at the same time. 

I called my sister, the head of the police, and she came down but before she got there I fainted. I woke up after 5 minutes and explained everything, from how I hadn’t seen them in three months and how there was random stuff on the curb. After I told her everything, she got me to go home while she took the goo, unicorn, and shovel to inspect. Once she finished looking at everything, she called me to ask me to go and see her. I walked in and asked, “What’s up?”. She asked if I knew the people who lived in the house. I said, “Jonny and Lila Dame”.  

She looked their names up on the computer to figure out more about them but all that showed up on the computer was ‘nothing found’. We both then glared at each other in confusion and wondered why nothing was there. It turned out she’s spelt the names wrong. She looked them up again and it said they had died over two months ago, and their daughter Polly died of unknown causes around 3 months ago. I started shaking as everything that we had just found out was starting to add up. My sister and I tried to track down relatives, but no one was found. Two weeks later when we got back to house, and the sign “Sold”. We asked the estate agent who bought the house, and they said an elderly couple.   We thought nothing of it when 6 months passed and once again 3 heavy bags of goo were found on the curb... 

Name withheld upon request. 7A