Colour Pencils

This got published in an anthology pamphlet for Youth in Print. I won one book from that competition, which was really cool.

It’s about a guy who is being stalked by a girl, and the theme was Past and Future.

Ouroborotastic!

Terrance watched as Mike sped down the hill on his bike. He rolled over all the little bumps, shaking due to the shoddy bike, and rattled to a halt at the bottom of the hill.

Terrance jabbed the stop button on his timer and noted the time with satisfaction. He did wish that he could race down the hill himself, but crooked foot plus bike always equaled accident, a fact that he had been testament to a few times.

“You didn’t beat your last time!” Terrance called out. “Sorry!”

Mike yelled back a series of swear words before jumping off the bike. After taking out his frustration on a few rocks and muttering about how he could do better, Mike began to wheel the bike up the hill. He suddenly stopped only a quarter-up, a look of confusion, and began to peer around.

“You know that chick?” Mike yelled, gesturing at one of the run down houses that lined the hill. This particular house looked like it had survived two hurricanes and a wildfire, ruined and blackened as it was.

It was one of the many burnt houses that the council never knocked down, which bred plenty of ghost stories about the neighbourhhood. It was the kind of place that everybody whispered about but nobody actually went; perfect for speeding down hills at break-neck speeds without getting hassled or caught.

Terrance grabbed his binoculars and peered through it, but apart from a brief shadow, he saw nobody there.

“Let’s go,” said Mike nervously. “This place is starting to freak me out.”

They went off without looking back.

When they got to the bus shelter, there was a girl in an tattered school uniform and an eye patch sitting there. She perked up as soon as Mike and Terrance sat down.

“Hi,” she said, extremely brightly. “You’re Terrance and… Mike, right?”

Warning bells went off in Terrance’s head. He was just about to ask her who she was when the bus arrived. Mike and Terrance got on and swiped their cards. When they grabbed two bus seats, Mike discreetly pointed to the girl who had followed them.

She walked up the aisle and sat in front of them, turning to look into Terrance’s eyes. “Do you believe in fate?”

That was weird. He was very tempted to ignore Miss. Weird, but Mike was nudging him and Mike’s elbow was very sharp. “Not really.”

“I do,” muttered Mike.

“Fate dictates love,” the girl said. “And trust. It’s okay to find people you think you know and then you fall in love. Because.”

The weirdness readings were off the chart.

The girl was fixating on his eyes, her own boring holes into his. “You have beautiful brown eyes,” she said.

“…Thanks?” Terrance tried to come up with a compliment for her, looking at her old uniform and her limp brown hair with a streak of red, and the strip of cloth that covered her right eye.

“I wish I had two eyes,” the girl said sadly. “I lost one in an accident, when I was younger.”

There was a moment of awkward silence before Mike saved him by saying, “Oh, look! Here’s your stop, Terrance. See you tomorrow at school!”

It wasn’t his stop, but it was the one before. Terrance grabbed his bag and quickly walked out of the bus, not looking back to see if she was following. He limped as fast as he could, stopping only when he was at least a block from the main road and there was no sign of the crazy girl at all.

Terrance wondered if the girl was a stalker. Or the Stalker? There had been many sightings of a shadowy shape that would often skirt across a window or two. It wasn’t a very desirable suburb with the hill of burnt houses and this shadow scaring many people away. Apparently, the sightings had started on the day he was born, which was creepy but probably just coincidental.

He continued walking; his thoughts interrupted by the sound… of fire? Terrance walked as fast as he could, feeling a strange sensation of ripping and the air tearing apart and then

A house was on fire. Rippling, crackling, the flames were snaking through the cracks, pawing at the wooden walls with fierce intensity. There was a strained sobbing, and through the open doorway, Terrance could see the silhouette of a young girl. He stumbled forwards, across the path, the heat flaring into his face when he stood just outside the doorway.

In the house, flames billowed from several doors. The little girl was dangerously close to one of the doors. She looked only six or seven, and as she turned towards him, a box of matches fell from her hand.

“Come with-” Terrance began, and then he tripped over a step placed just behind the door. He tried to get up but his crooked foot just wasn’t co-operative, folding when he tried to put some weight on it. Finally, he grabbed onto a small table to pull himself up when the girl shrieked in pain. Standing up, he managed to lurch forwards and grab the girl, pulling her back in one surprisingly steady movement.

They got outside the house, Terrance pulling her to the gate. He noticed with horror that her right eye was extremely red and there was a small burn on her cheek. He dialed the emergency number on his mobile and answered the operator’s questions quickly.

“Are you okay?” he asked the little girl after he hung up. She didn’t say anything, just looked up at him with a hint of adoration.

After a while, she answered with, “It hurts. I can’t see out of my right eye.” A short pause, then, “Thanks for rescuing me.”

When the ambulences came, they ignored him and his questions, not noticing him at all. They went, and Terrance was left there, alone with the flaming houses. The wind started to pick up, fanning the flames over to other houses. Fire engines could be heard in the distance.

He walked quickly away. He started to head in a direction he thought was home, and without quite knowing how he found himself at the front door.
-
When a crazy person you see one day is waiting to ambush you the next, you might wonder if you were crazy yourself.

The girl in the old school uniform had been waiting for him the next day when he turned the block. She cornered him, him backing away until the fence blocked his way.

“What do you want? I need to go to school!”

“Our pasts and futures are intertwined,” she said in a strange monotonous voice. “My future in your past, my past in your future.”

He turned away and shouted for help but nobody was here, nobody was listening and there was a weird rippling in the air.

“You saved me,” the girl said. “Yesterday.”

“Wait, what?”

She smiled but did not say anything. “Time may be twisted to serve one’s needs. Time is fate. Fate is love.”

“Let go of me!” He elbowed her aside and ran, or at least limped. When he got to the end of the street, he turned to see her wink at him.

“You cannot run, Terrance. This is fate.”

He ran.
-
The girl stepped away from the running boy and the world of 2010, and into another place, about a few years earlier – when, hopefully, she could see him. It was nice, seeing him as a child. He was so innocent.

He was playing football on the pavement of a main road, a little boy of ten.

She was going to walk past him casually, but she misjudged the distance, depth perception lost due to her lost eye, bumped into him – and he tripped and fell into the path of a car.

She rushed to his side and cradled him, shouting to a bystander to call the ambulence.
-
A newspaper later stated that because of the lack of safe playgrounds and an unfortunate accident, a boy’s leg had not healed properly. He was lucky that he had survived, and even more lucky that a Good Samaritan had rushed to his side immediately, but he would limp for the rest of his life, due to an accident of fate.
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