Our Short Stories: Year 4

To end our unit of study on short stories, we wrote some of our own inspired by an image. Take a look at our best work from the students in Year 4:

BLACK or WHITE? “GREY”

by Ginevra Vannuzzi & Beatrice Iodice

It was a good day for our Juliette. In the small city of Wales, she was adopted by an excessively big family, and her life would be so difficult … It was another rainy day when some politicians imposed new laws to limit black people's rights. 

Juliette was an 18-year-old, sensitive, creative and kind girl who was born in Africa. She had long curly hair, green eyes and she was quite tall. Although she had suffered a lot during her childhood for the her color of her the skin, one day something changed.                        

In an old dusty library worked Matthew, a 20-year-old white man, very open minded, clever and honourable, maybe because he loved to read books. There, Juliette went to find a Harper Lee’s novel called To Kill a Mockingbird about the fight against racism. There were a few moments of silence when their eyes peered into each other. In a muffled, hesitant voice, the girl said: “Do you have any Harper Lee novels?” and Matthew showed her some books. At that moment they fell in love, but they didn’t know that their love would be very difficult… Juliette started to secretly meet Matthew because her father, Rob, didn’t want her to! Rob was a selfish, cruel and insensitive man, who always wanted to “protect” his daughter, but she didn’t need it. He was a 50-year-old fat man, very possessive toward his daughter Juliette and certainly not very informed about youth. 

On a sunny day, Matthew and Juliette met, and while he was pushing her hood back, revealing her curly black hair, Rob arrived and said angrily, "Juliette, what are you doing here with this boy?" He waited for a response from her, but she didn’t raise her head. Rob continued: “You are grounded, go home!” and she ran away. 

Thoughts began to run through Juliette’s mind. She wanted to fight for her love, for her true feelings and so, as an act of rebellion, she created a dress with the pages of Harper Lee’s novel and she escaped from her room wearing it. She went to the city center, and she started screaming loudly - while cameras were recording- that she had the same rights of white people, that she was free. Juliette said: “Why are black people, like me, treated differently from others? I say BLACK or WHITE? “GREY!” She continued:” We have the same dignity and we can decide who we want to love!”Suddenly Matthew appeared and a smile began to spread on her face. Matthew asked her to marry him and she accepted, in the name of her freedom. 

THE END.

Letter to My Sister

by Agostini, Cammi, Doni

Dear Susan,  

I miss you. 

I miss your presence here with me. Everyone misses you but you don’t have to worry about me because I'm starting to feel better and  better. I think this is also due to a very unique event. I think it’s something spectacular, even if apparently insignificant. 

Every day I see two young  people walking in front of my terrace. I don’t know their names and they are not even engaged. Yet I cannot explain how I look forward to their everyday meeting. They don’t exchange any words and barely look at each other, but in that split second I feel a spark, and I'm not even an acquaintance of theirs. Ironically, I call them “the boy with the hat” and “the girl with dogs” just to give you an idea. You would not believe it, but I have also bought binoculars to better observe them. The man’s style is charming, and as you may have guessed he always wears a hat while the woman is well-dressed and colourful. She always walks her dogs, so joyfully that I become happy just looking at her.  

By now I am practically obsessed with the two of them. Every  afternoon at 16.30 I look out the window hoping to see them again because I fell madly in love with their looks, the same ones that mum and dad had when they looked into each other's eyes, don’t you remember? You can't understand how much I miss them, but the two of them make me want to smile again. As you know by now they have never said a single word to one another, but from my window I can observe their shadows from above, which is as if they were speaking to each other. While they observe each other, the world around them stops for a few  moments, and it is as if by magic they were catapulted into one of Isabel Allende’s books. 

One day I was at the window while they were there walking on the sidewalk, without even looking at each other. Then I decided at a certain point to scream: “Talk to each other!” Without understanding where the voice was coming from, they turned around and it was love at first sight. Despite the distance that separates us, I still have a little hope. 

Goodbye and see you soon,  

Sophie

The equivocal sense of the words

by Emma Giannelli, Giovanni Fazzi, Elena Veccia

He had just gotten home after a hard day at work and so, he went as usual to the kitchen to get some  water.  As he turned on the tap, he looked at the dirty dishes  messily arranged in the sink. His children were are probably  having fun somewhere in the house while his wife was talking loudly on the phone in the living room. The glass filled with water, and the water spilled over the rim, wetting his whole hand. He immediately turned off the tap, and he turned toward the table, dripping down the floor with his overflowing glass of water in his right hand.  While he was sipping water he looked at the clock on the opposite wall, it was 7:22 p.m.

The door closed behind her, the sun was about to set over the west coast.  She often went for walks that way to the place where she regularly meets her friends. She really likes it there because during the summer it’s always full of people looking at the stalls, creating a festive atmosphere. She really needs to be distracted this afternoon.

He’s thinking of his family in Camargo. Since he left for the United States, he had not seen them again, maybe that was the price he had to pay for a life he found fulfilling. When he was only 19 years old, he ran away from home taking his current wife with him. He  was employed in a shoe factory, and for 20 years he did  nothing but polishing, cutting and lacing shoes. Despite his menial job, he managed to afford a modest house and feed his two children. He remembered the birth of Andrew, a moment full of joy, and his little Elias making two toy cars collide. For a while he reconstructed  every happy moment  that crossed his mind, but when he got closer to the present, his mood slowly changed. Now he’s thinking  about himself as if he were looking at a mirror in front of him, and all those pleasant times had vanished. He never did anything so important in his life despite his efforts, and nothing he dreamed of really materialized.  If he had stayed in Camargo he would probably have enjoyed a little more time spent with his grandparents, but he actually didn’t care about that so much, and also the memory of his hometown had faded. He imagined his parents in their desolate garden. It looks like a graveyard.

The world was falling upon her; never before had she suffered like that. She had broken up with her boyfriend, but she believed that it wasn’t the relationship with him that made her feel so bad. She had high expectations for her future. She wanted to study and graduate with honours, and then find a respectable job and have a peaceful and balanced life. With these ideas in her head she had been busy with books, eating healthfully, and practicing yoga regularly. Now, the appearance of a fault in her  almost perfect life has crushed her plans. Although she was trying hard to keep everything under control, her heart was getting heavier and heavier. The structure assiduously built in her mind was inexorably collapsing and what remained was just the desperate action of quickening her pace. She was on the verge of bursting with emotion when as soon as she turned the corner, those anguished thoughts began to ease at the dazzling sight of the red sun setting fabulously over the sea. She was so engrossed in herself that she hadn’t even noticed the lively atmosphere that passers by were making from afar and the hubbub of the stalls.

The gentle rising and falling of the waves made him forget for a little while what 10 seconds ago disturbed him. Faced with the spectacle that the port held in store, the people around him became ghosts, but he also felt that he was not alone among all those shadows. There was someone else present. He turned his head as if he had a magnet attached to his left temple. A girl was staring at him in the middle of the flow of the people. She was very young,  probably she was 18 years old, and she was also very beautiful, with long straight brown hair and an elegant upright posture. Her shining eyes looked into his pupils, but she didn’t seem to have any interest in investigating him. She seemed to be there more by chance. Even though her lips were making a soft smile her expression was the opposite of being happy. Surely, she was also in difficulty. He really wanted to console her as a father would console his daughter.

How strange, she stopped thinking about her boyfriend and now she was thinking about that man who, for some mysterious reason, had felt close to  her more than anything else. She thought to herself, "Maybe he has broken up with someone, too."  She was trying to figure out what could perturb his soul, but she couldn’t can’t come up with an explanation. The sun disappeared under the horizon and she finally got home. She went into the kitchen; she’s very thirsty.