Short stories

My Shadow On A Hill

It follows me, letting its presence known, as it battles the forceful wind just as I do. It's always performing a continuous mime, miming my dreary life.

I've tried to escape its grasp, and all the secrets it holds. The secret I want to avoid, to leave behind. But it carries them, and it follows me.

Everyone sees it, but no-one notices it. At least not like I do. It haunts my nervous sunlight walks; it swallows me during night-time thoughts.

My shadow.

The holder of all my secrets and fears.

So as I sit on this lonely hill, I try to ignore my sinister shadow by losing myself in this natural world. So I sit on my favourite solitary hill, the willow tree, on which I rest against, hides me with its green fringe. As the fierce wind blows it parts the willows leaves, as it does I catch a glance at the view before me.

A view that is beautiful in every way. It starts with a slow drop into a meadow of whispering grass, followed by fields filled with golden hay or greedy cows; that eat anything that dares cross there path.

Then looming in the distance are the mountains of black. They stand caging me in this valley. Yet maybe they are guarding me, from the danger of the other side.

However magnificent they seem, they disgust me. I see them as a shadow. A shadow that sees all and is too colossal to move, one that I cannot even attempt to ignore.

And so the shadow engulfs me.

My terrible secret hugs my petrified mind.

For me there is no escape.

My guilty secret......

I killed him, that's my secret.

I killed my father, I was forever yelling at him and then he left. He left mother and I, for the army, for war. To the war that had him torn away from me and placed in the deserts of the Middle East, to the sweltering heat and inescapable sand. He wrote about the beautiful burnt sunsets, and shuddering cold nights. He told me that they had visited a temple of Muslim birth; the people invited them in and gave them food. The once enemy was being friend and that had brought him to tears.

But the beautiful place he described was not as it seemed as he left mother and I, for the war that got him shot, straight through the heart. The heart that I had already shattered.

No-one would think that I am capable of this, not from a girl like me:

· With roasted hazel hair,

· Train track braces,

· With goody-two-shoes grades,

· An apparently adult way of thinking.

But it was me. I yelled and constantly had fights with him and it made him leave. Taking mums smile with him, leaving me with the guilt of a thousand deaths.

That is the silent secret my shadow screams out at me.