by Olivia, 7th Grade – An excerpt from her short story.
They say that the old woman who told me this was an eccentric. I am not so certain, for I, and I alone, saw a stranger go into the woods outside our village in the autumn of my eighth year, and not come out. I know this because I waited for him for hours. (Strangers are a rarity in our village, and I wanted the privilege of being the first to greet our guest). I did not go into the forest after him, because, even if no one else believed the old woman’s story, (Hag, they call her), we have been taught to dread the creatures that make their home in the woods. Wolves the size of men. Bears the size of small cottages. We call these things Killers.
I told my account of the stranger to my mum, and she told me that “one of them Killers must’ve gotten him, poor feller,” but the Killers attack the feeble-minded who decide to venture into the fringes of the forest, and I heard no screams. The man must have been farther in.
The Hag is the closest thing that I have to a friend. I protect her from what the Vagrants would do to her and her home, and, in return, she tells me legends forgotten by everyone but her. The half-magic people that make their homes in the moors to the west, who live in the shape of Men, and the corpses that rise from the unmarked graves once every hundred years, and the fiery bird that, it is said, will ride in with the end of time, setting the sky to fire.
I listen to her in awe, shivers running up and down my spine. I had heard my parents discussing me, how it was not natural for me not to be playing with other boys my age, and instead listening to an old, half-insane woman tell ‘dark magyk stories’. They think that it is because of her that I am “turning out strange.”
I do not know the Hag’s name, and have never asked it, and never will. She is Hag. No name would suit her better.
The Quill Online 