Untitled

They were all very ugly children. All but the youngest, who seemed to have sucked the beauty right out of all the rest of them. And all of their nasty habits, too. One might think that this would have made the other children bitter but this was not true at all. The ragged band lived together in a broken down bus and a groundkeeper at a nearby estate often brought them leftovers, vegetables and day old bread deemed inedible by the cook. Between the scraps, their small vegetable garden, and sneaking into the neighboring estates at night to hunt and steal fruit from the orchards, they managed to keep malnutrition at bay. What they lacked in guidance they possessed in freedom. They had appeared on a warm morning after a week of fierce storms. The townspeople had been too preoccupied with the aftermath of the tempest to notice the arrival of a handful of children. How they arrived in these desperate circumstances was as improbable as it was fantastic. It had all begun with a typewriter factory in Woodstock, Illinois. It was this factory where little steady hands could find work. It was owned by the manager of the orphanage where they had been living, and the man turned a pretty profit combining the one with the other. He wasn't a cruel man, but he had been cheated by life, and no longer believed in love or justice. He had worked the children long hours, leaving them with just enough strength to crawl into bed at night. All the children accepted the appalling conditions as a matter of course, having never known anything better. All but the youngest, that is. She had dreamed of escape constantly and the risk of a beating was no deterrent for her. She would have risked anything, but the tornado changed all that. They had huddled in the basement as the storm, chugging like a freight train, passed overhead. When the noise had passed, they unbarred the hatch and came out into a vast emptiness. The hills had been scrubbed clean. Not a person, not a building, not a tree, not an animal in sight, as if they had never existed. The children walked, starving and alone, until they came upon the town. The town rested in a deep canyon and many of the buildings were set against the cliff face. One door was open so that they could see a empty room and a dark cave beyond. Some buildings looked so old and disheveled that it amazed the children that they were even still standing.

Displaying all 22 submissions