Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time there was a heavenly garden on the edge of a cliff that overlooked the churning sea. The garden was fertile, green and luscious, with all the promise of new blooms every spring. It was this way until it was bombed to smithereens in the war. The war came quickly but, like most, followed some rise in political and social upset, and naturally and dramatically changed the lives of everyone that lived thereabouts.
Now there is no green dewy grass that the sun shone off in the morning; there is rubble. There had been a small rose garden at one end of the larger shrubbery, which had been one of seventeen year old Thomas’ favourite places to relax in when the world became heavy on his shoulders (just as though he were Atlas). Thomas would lie back between the rows of roses – his colour preference to lie amongst leaned to the purity of the whitest variety – and look at the sky for at least fifteen minutes every day, creating in his mind superheroes and Gods from the cotton-ball clouds above, whilst breathing in the salty sea air that rose up and over the cliff. He lay appreciating the fact that his house even had a garden, and appreciating the roses particularly (as his Mother had informed him that “They are hard to grow in the silty, sandy earth near the beach and exposed to the cruel winds atop the cliff.”)
One day, many years ago, Thomas had just spotted a cloud he could only describe as ‘dog-tastic,’ when he heard a terrifying, long, earsplitting screech from somewhere above. Because of that, he immediately jerked his upper half upright to a sitting position, bending his legs into a mountain for balance. He realised that his left leg had fallen quite asleep (it protested the sudden change of circumstance via a strong bought of pins and needles). Ignoring this, Thomas craned his neck and turned his head to the right to lay his eyes upon the silver fuselage of a fighter jet that rushed fiercely toward him. The menacing sky-fish (as his younger sister called them) dropped the bomb, Thomas’ eyes in a state of disbelief as they actually followed the bomb coming toward him. His brain did not catch up. The plane had dropped its precious cargo, but dropped it in precisely the wrong location, and quite swiftly, killed both Thomas and all the beauty of the garden.
Because of this, the whole house and indeed many of the surrounding houses and gardens and the families that belonged in them ceased to exist in any way that they had previously been known. Years passed and the war raged over the clotted dirt and the broken bricks, the dust taking a human’s perception of eternity to settle, until finally, from the dust and clotted dirt and ruined lives, one small rose bud poked unassumingly up from the brown earth, and that is what is there today. This proves that life certainly goes on in some form, even if there is no audience left to acknowledge it.
That was the story of the larrikin Thomas’ demise, which to you may seem quite simple, plain and uncomplicated. But you don’t yet know Thomas and therefore surely cannot be expected to truly care for him or his family. So I guess I had better tell you just a little more about his life altogether…