Faraway Competition - First Prize Winners 14-18 age group

Nostalgia by Rebecca Cole
First Prize Short Story 14-18 year olds

From my stomach, that’s where this pain started. Like a small marble rolling around on the wooden floorboards that line the bottom of this boat. I lift my eyes to the stars as the waves provide a water bed on which the sky sleeps. The pain has dissipated now. It’s in my blood. It’s in my veins being pumped without permission. It’s forcing me to feel when all I want is numbness. 

Feel. The dark night is lit by the breeze that brushes my hair across my nose, sticking to the makeup that is smudged in an unsightly way over my peppered face. 
It’s surging now, convulsing. My throat is a trapdoor; my words are caught between my tongue and teeth. Like water entering my lungs, constricting, compressing, suffocating my already fragile breath. Like a pit, dug deep in my chest, aching to be filled. 

I grip the side of this boat and the sea splashes, sparingly along my knuckles. Alright! Enough! I tear the pale handkerchief in my teeth and lay myself down upon the splinters. The salty air rests itself on my nose. 

Bullets. The golden sand that once was mistaken for treasure was now stained the colour of deep and dying roses. The mountains, governing the valley, stood permanently snow-capped, a necklace of frosty clouds hung lowly. 

That day the sun struggled feebly down the crack in the wall plaster, illuminating the dust like fairy lights I once saw at school. Once. School. A long time ago. 
That night my Father, his beard so long it touched the rim of his tea cup, rolled me into a blanket, like I was a food inside pita bread.

“Abbi?” my voice was worn with sleep, grated, whispering.

“Hush, my darling, the Sun is still sleeping. You do not want to wake Him.” 

I wanted to trust him, to believe that the noise outside my plywood walls, the yells, the screams... I wanted to trust him that those noises would not wake the sun, that it would not wake me. 

Fire. It roared out of the mouths of the stone buildings, engulfing everything.

Water. Drifted us away, tried to make us stay, indecisive, without reason, couldn’t be reasoned with.

And on those fateful nights my father would lift my eyes unto the stars.

“Be still, daughter. Know that I am with you.” He, with his course hands from working, he, with his weary smile, he gently tucked a white handkerchief into my frightened figures.

And so I twist it. The pain now gone. Tears have cleaned the makeup off my face. The boat is still.
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I look into the heavens and see the beauty of the space, the constellations, the nebulas in all their miraculous colours as if God himself took a paintbrush and carefully sculpted the very essence of the universe. And when I look up to the skies, I remember the stars, the boat, the water and the fire. I remember my Abbi, he will come back.

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Untitled by Aalliyah Woods
​First Prize Illustration 14-18 year olds
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 A 'Place' Far From My Own by Sarah Plant
​First Prize Poetry 14-18 year olds

She lives in a ‘place’ so faraway.
A ‘place' where love is exiled…

She is a wife deprived of sanity;
From a man who thrives on profanity!

Her face resembles the turmoil of torture.
The heartache of hopelessness, 
And the darkest depths of despair.

For she is a soul that has been restrained, 
And forced to endure pain.

A woman stripped of her name,
And told she is to blame.

A victim of Domestic Violence…