RGS M.A.D.E Magazine December 2020

Foreign Shores (written in TAA by a Year 10 Student , inspired by this image) A heady wind growls by, Heady sea scent slinking in with sly tides Flat sand lies still Horizon winks nervously with day’s final rays that glide And grace each curve and crevice of land they find Sheer mountain’s impasse at my back A host of wrinkles, of rock that grin Toothily, grey with malice I steel myself and walk; a place I haven’t been Welcomes me, strangely. I sense second intention within Light’s last words reach my ears Night’s tyrannous hand prowls And seizes in tyrannous control There is no saving the corrupted land I ramble upon now And so I double my step, chills up and down my back hound And then, A whisper on the impenetrable haze of inky darkness that engulfs me Light! And louder, and louder the whisper grows And so home greets me once again With outstretched arms and warm embrace Much unlike that of the foreign shore that I once paced There was something different. Something I couldn’t place my finger upon. Something about the air in the form room. I could just feel it. The kind of feeling when there’s something in the corner of your eye which shouldn’t be there – but whenever you turn to look at it, it is gone. A twitching of the eyelid, or an ache to the brain sometimes. As if there is something impossible which your brain can’t comprehend or visualise. Then the feeling that someone is staring, the itch between the shoulder blades which makes you turn around, only to find nothing out of the ordinary. Yet there was something, a slight static to the air or a breeze where there shouldn’t be. Any other day there would be a blend of chatter and voices shouting and piling on top of each other, mixed with the clatter and constant tapping sounds of iPads and books being brought out from bags and fiddled with. Then there would always be the clicking of pens, and the scribble of pencils, and the jingle and music of phones. But today, there was something missing. Was it the symphony of fiddle toys, or the one missing voice of the crowd, or the missing presence of a family of gaming noises, it wasn’t quite possible to tell. But there was something not right about the melody of the form room. It was like the major key, all jolly and playful, had dropped to a minor key, suspenseful and with one note not quite the same. Furtively glancing around the room in the hope of quickly catching out the person, or visual difference, I tried to work out what had changed. Realising that I had only checked the area around me and any differences in the floor, I brought my eyes up to the ceiling, as an unexplainable sense of fear and dread overcame me. And as I dragged my eyes further towards the ceiling, my brain began to resist my movements, as if there was a layer of glue upon my eyes, preventing me from seeing the ceiling. Now the strange sensations became more intense, coming at me from all directions, as if everyone was staring at me. Still pushing through the glue, and dragging my vision with me, I began to feel a heavy discomfort and suspenseful, chilling feeling, as I forced on through the visual glue. Eerily, everyone had suddenly stopped what they were doing and become silent, and I could sense again the feeling that they were watching me with intensity like a laser beam. Finally I broke through the barrier of resistance and realised why I had such trouble trying to see what was up there. My brain had been warning me. For what I saw was terrible: a monstrous, deformed shape, not even distinguishable as a creature; an indescribable being which would give me nightmares forever. Short Story by a Year 8 Student Creative Writing Club

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