Dreamless

So this is a short story I did for a school competition named 'Dream'. Cover art is mine and thank you to @sandsea for giving me the guts to publish this : ) Tell me what you think...

There once was a boy, who had no dreams.

At first he didn't mind. He went about his business living in his humble present. True, it was a good enough life. He was happy.

Until...

The other children, his friends, his classmates, started to have dreams.

Sometimes they would even stop playing football, and talk about them, in tightly packed circles.

The boy, outside the circle, would snort. "Pfft! Look at them all, gossiping like girls. I don't need dreams."

The boy kicked the ball, angrily, into an empty goal.

But then came the lessons. The dreaded lessons, where the students organised their dreams into ladders, each rung neatly labelled. The teachers whizzed about, helping set the foundations. Friends chatted happily, and held the ladder steady for each other.

The boy sat back and watched.

Why were they so happy?

Digging his heels firmly into the ground, the boy glared.

Nobody asked for him to hold their ladder steady for them.

And he didn't offer.

The worst thing was, they wouldn't even stop outside of school. The worst thing was they seemed to enjoy the arduous strain of climbing each rung.

But there was one particular girl who seemed to like it more. And for the life of him, the boy couldn't figure out why.

He couldn't take it anymore.
He wouldn't take it anymore.

He stormed right up to her and erupted. He didn't touch a single hair on her head. But his tongue, lashing about inside of his mouth, was enough. The girl didn't have time to run.

At the end, when only unsettling ash plumes remained, a single tear fell from the girl's cheek. She caught it in her palm, and passed it to the boy. The boy looked down as the tear, from the moment it touched his skin, dried up and became a seed. When he looked up, the girl was gone.

In frustration, he threw the seed away to a far patch of grass. To his astonishment it started growing. A stem became a trunk and the leaves became branches.

Without hesitation the boy latched onto a branch and started climbing. Higher and higher. He did not notice that the higher he climbed, the more slender the branches grew and the more spindly the trunk.

He did not notice all the nests he stomped his way through in his haste, and he did not notice the branches that snapped under his weight as he sought out answers.

However, he noticed when the warm wooden branches turned into cold metal rungs. He noticed when the ladder started to sway.

He stopped climbing and looked down but there was no one to hold him steady.