Anyway, enough about my overabundance of homework - it's time for a teaser!!
This is the opening chapter (it's a short chapter) of the short novel I'm working on for my class. Long time blog readers might recognize it, as the idea came from a short story I wrote about a year ago, although there are quite a few differences in the new version - namely that the protagonist is about two years older, and that it's now a novel instead of a short story.
In any case, I hope you enjoy it!
-------------------------------------
Brixton
London
November,
1940
The
air raid siren did not scare Sophie Miller any longer.
Never
mind that it was cold and the middle of the night; the siren went off, whooping
across the darkness like some sort of alien bird, and Sophie obeyed its call.
She and her mother got out of bed, pulled on socks and slippers and dressing
gowns at coats, bundling up against the possibility of a long night in the
tin-and-concrete Anderson shelter. The air outside was bitingly cold, and it
did not yet smell of dust and smoke and burnt things the way Sophie knew it
would sooner or later. So far, there was no sound aside from the siren and
neighbors clattering towards their own backyard shelters.
Sophie
and her mother crossed the yard in silence – there was nothing that needed to
be said – and clambered inside their little vegetable-covered Anderson shelter.
She switched on the torch then, hoping that the batteries would last till the
end of the raid this time, and reached for the overstuffed suitcase that was
settled beneath the little wooden cot inside the bomb shelter. The suitcase
held anything she and her mother had, in a fit of fancy, deemed important – a
layer of legal documents settled at the bottom, covered by pictures of her
father, favorite earrings, a carefully wrapped tea set that had belonged to
Sophie’s grandmother, and books. Sophie took out one of the books and clambered
onto the cot beside her mother, letting half the blanket be wrapped around her
as they snuggled together while Sophie balanced the torch between her cheek and
her shoulder and the book on her bony knees and began to read. In a voice that
was at first heavy with sleep, then louder as the sound of the siren was
replaced by the eerie soft roar of plane engines and the distant
soul-shattering crashes of bombs, she read from the evening’s chosen book –
this time it was Twelfth Night –
relishing in the feel of the familiar syllables falling from her lips and the
warm weight of her mother’s shoulder pressing in to hers.
The
explosions that battered the world outside their tin can shelter grew closer,
and Sophie had to raise her voice again and again to make herself heard above
the noise and above the panic that threatened to overtake her as each explosion
sounded more and more near.
And
then the earth itself seemed to shake.
The
force of the explosion knocked the pair off the cot and onto the hard, cold
floor, which was where they stayed, gasping and clinging and frightened, for a
good long while. There were more explosions outside, although none so close,
but Twelfth Night lay forgotten on
the floor, and the glass of the torch was cracked, keeping them in darkness.
When
at last the all-clear signal sounded and Sophie creaked open the door of the
Anderson shelter, she had expected to see what she had always seen: the back
door of her little house in Brixton, where she had spent all her life, with its
grey painted siding and blue painted windows. She expected to see the fence
along her yard and the shadow of the neighbor’s houses. But all of that was
gone.
Her
mother put her hand on Sophie’s shoulder in what was probably meant to be a
comforting gesture but was in reality a vice grip as the two of them stepped
into a wholly alien landscape. There was a great, gaping black hole where her
house had been, stretching across the street, leaving the back wall of the
house to stand precariously on its own. The windows had shattered, and the
curtains that her mother had made were beginning to catch fire.
It
was as though Sophie had closed the door on the world she’d known and opened it
on an utterly new one. Had she been able to speak, she might have echoed Viola
and said “what country, friends, is this?” because it was not Brixton.
It
was not home, and it would never be home again.
