Ardent Author's Writing Challenge Entry #3
Welcome back and happy Friday, my lovelies! Today I am SO excited to share my 3rd AAWC Entry with you guys. It is definitely my favorite so far! (And probably the longest, and the one that felt most natural and just kinda flowed out of me)
Team Summer is currently in first place, you guys! Let's keep rocking it!
Crossed Fingers and Cattle Rustlers
The silence was deafening. It pressed in on her head and rang in her ears. Yet she sat still, never breaking the quiet, never moving. It lasted forever; stretched out over hours, days, maybe even years. This five minutes of silence was an eternity. Rows of straight-backed wooden chairs were lined up behind plain wooden desks. Rows of straight-backed children sat rigid on their chairs and waited. Half of them didn't even know why they were waiting, but they knew enough to keep their mouths shut and do what they were told. Rows of tight braids mixed with clean cuts sat behind the desk, waiting eternally through an eternal silence. Even the cicadas outside stopped humming. The pressure inside the room was enough to make silence everywhere. No horses riding by, no chattering people on the streets - there was complete silence. It was such an awfully perfect silence. And Joelle was adamant that she wouldn't be the one to break it.
Someone in the back row coughed. The vulture-like teacher shot the child a nasty look, and then slowly turned his beady eyes back to his book. The silence had been broken, however and several children shifted in their seats or yawned widely. The teacher gave a disgruntled little huff and shut his book with a snap. A stray cricket chirped outside the window, and that was the end of that. Joelle, however, defiantly sat in her seat, daring her schoolmaster to find fault with her. She wouldn't cave in to his critical gaze.
"You will all stay thirty minutes after school tomorrow as well. you all must pay the consequences for your actions. Class is dismissed." Joelle quickly piled her books into her bag and stalked out the door. Fury coursed through her veins as she powered down the path to her home. She was being blamed for something that she didn't do. Everything got blamed on her. She had misbehaved and lied only a few times, and now everything was her fault. Nobody cared enough to look into it. Nobody cared enough to use actual logic. It wasn't fair.
Joelle soon found herself at her house. The trip never took more than five minutes, but in the midst of her mental abstraction it felt like she had just left the schoolhouse ten seconds ago. She walked up the front path and reached for the handle of the door, but somebody opened it before she could. That somebody was somebody Joelle didn't know - a big, tall imposing man - but she did know this: he didn't belong in her house.
"What are you doing here?" He spat, looking surprised.
"This is my house." Joelle stuck her chin out defiantly and tried to show the courage and fierceness that she didn't feel.
"Not anymore," said the man with a snarl. He shoved her off the porch, shut the door, and locked it. Joelle quickly got on her feet and began banging on the door.
"Where are my mom and dad?" she shouted. "Let me in! It's my house!" But there was just about as much chance of her teacher not punishing her as there was of the man letting her inside. She ran around the house and scanned her family's fields. Today the hired boy didn't come, so her father should be out working, but he wasn't - and Joelle gasped as she realized what had happened. Her eyes widened and she ran to the barn, where her horse sat unsaddled. She geared it up in a flash and the horse was sprinting down the path. In 3 minutes she was riding into town.
She dismounted and ran to the sheriff's. She looked around breathlessly, clutching at a stitch in her side, but the policeman was gone. Joelle walked to the door and scanned the street, but he was nowhere to be found. In desperation she ran to the saloon and found the bartender. "My parents have been kidnapped," she gasped between ragged breaths. "There's a big strange man at my house and he's locked the doors!" There was silence for a second, and then she was hearing laughter - turning, she found that it came from her most dreaded schoolmaster.
"And you really expect us to believe that, what with all of the lies you've told?" The rest of the bar started to laugh, and Joelle looked around, her eyes pleading for someone to help. But they were all too busy tossing back their evil glasses and twirling their evil mustaches. She knew her mistake, but she thought that they would at least send somebody to check the situation out. Nonetheless, Joelle turned on her heel and marched out of the grubby bar. Her horse had wandered over to a water trough, and she angrily mounted, swinging the horse around.
The sun was starting to go down as Joelle trotted along the road. She had realized that if she didn't find a place to sleep, she would be out with the coyotes and wild animals that always tried to eat the cattle. If they found cows yummy, wouldn't they also like the little girl? She shivered, but she didn't know if it was from fright or from the quickly dropping temperature. Finally she reached the house of the only other person in the village who truly understood, and she knocked on the door after tying her horse up.
As expected, Annie opened the door and looked confused. "Joelle, why are you here? It's late, you should be home!"
"I can't! I got home this afternoon and a strange man came out of my house and told me that it wasn't my home anymore! Then he locked the door and I couldn't get in. He's got my parents in there, Annie! And of course I rushed into town, and went into the saloon to get some help, but of course Mr Bradshaw was there and he told everyone I was lying! Oh please, can I stay with you tonight? I don't get scared easy, but I'm so afraid of that man and the coyotes, and I'm terribly sorry for all of this!"
"Oh, Jo, that's awful! Of course you can come in! We'll have to share a bed with my sisters but it's plenty warm. Do come in!" Annie brought her in and the girls sat down in a corner. "Do you have any idea who it might be?" She whispered. Joelle just shook her head.
"He looked familiar but I've been trying and trying to remember how, but I just can't put it together. And my parents could be tied up, or knocked out, or even dead by the time I could get anyone to help!"
"Calm down, Jo! You're stressed out. Do you want some tea?" The distressed girl merely nodded and laid her head back against the wall. One minute she had been worried about Mr Bradshaw and how unfair he was, and now her parents could be murdered cold by the time she could figure out who that man was. But over and over, all she could think as she sipped her tea was how much she hated Mr Bradshaw. "Mr Bradshaw...Mr Bradshaw....OH!" She sat up straight and her tea spilled a little on her dress. "Annie, Annie! The man looked like Mr. Bradshaw! That's why he looked so familiar. Annie?" For Annie had also sat up straight and slopped a little tea on her dress. Her eyes were widened in fear as she slowly turned to her friend.
"Oh, Jo! Didn't you hear the news this morning, about the escaped convict? His name was -" here she lowered her voice dramatically - "Zacharias Bradshaw! He was a mighty infamous cattle rustler who sometimes murdered the people he stole from! Oh, where is the paper? Father!" She ran to the other room where her father sat reading the paper, and Joelle was close behind her. Annie snatched the paper from her father and brought it to her friend. She read the front page in a whisper. "Yesterday morning, the notorious cattle rustler Zacharias Bradshaw escaped from the state jail. He was caught and put in prison 13 years ago by farmer -" she dropped the paper. "Oh my lanta, he was put in jail by your dad!"
Joelle was quickly putting the pieces together. Mr Bradshaw's brother was a criminal, he wanted to take revenge on her dad for catching and exposing him, and now he was going to kill them! But how could Mr Bradshaw act so normally when his brother was out trying to kill one of his students' parents? Unless...
"Annie, I think Mr Bradshaw was so fed up with me that he also wanted to take revenge! He's playing it cool to help his brother!" Joelle looked down at her feet. There was one problem left. "How are we ever going to convince anyone?"
The next day, there were the same rigid rows of rigid chairs and rigid desks and rigid children. There was the same unbearable silence, and the same unbearable smirks from the same unbearable vulture-like teacher. Joelle and Annie sat next to each other, holding hands for support. They had been passing each other notes under their desk all day, concerning what they should do, and how, and where on earth they were going to expose Mr Bradshaw. Joelle was starting to get a headache.
Finally the punishment was over, and the children filed out of the schoolroom again. Joelle had decided to go home with Annie - after all, what was the point of going to a house locked up with a murderer and two potentially dead people? Annie wanted to stop at the candy store on the way home. She had saved her chore money and wanted to get a treat for her and her friend to share, "To help with the stress," she said. They stared, mouths watering, at the shelves upon shelves of candies and sweets. They heard the clink of the door opening and closing, but they didn't bother to look up to see who it was. The storekeeper had just gone down to the cellar to bring up another box of sweets when Annie looked over to Joelle to ask her what she thought of lemon drops - and Joelle was gone. She looked around the tiny shop and saw nobody.
(^^Lemon drops are candies in Harry Potter, but they actually are real candies - my sister made some last week.)
The door hadn't clinked again - the person who had entered the shop must still be in the shop. Annie's mind raced and she grabbed the key from behind the sales desk. She locked the door from the outside, just in case Mr Bradshaw (for she was convinced it was him who had taken her friend) decided to come back out. She ran as fast as she could to the sheriff's office, and this time he was there.
"Mr Bradshaw - took - Joelle," she spluttered, breathing deeply. "In - candy - store - helping - Zacharias - Bradshaw -" But she couldn't even finish, for at her last two words the sheriff and all of his men grabbed their guns and ran out the door to the candy shop. Annie defiantly grabbed a shiny pistol from on the sheriff's desk and followed them.
When she arrived, the police were running around the building, looking for the evil brothers and the lying Joelle. Finally one shouted from the cellar. "The storekeeper has been knocked out! I think there's a trapdoor here!" They all ran down the stairs as fast as they could and helped the man pull open the heavy trapdoor. There was a tunnel there, which the group of men and Annie ran down as fast as it would allow them. When it came to an end, they pushed up a false grate and clambered out. Annie barely knew what was happening as they ran after the criminals in the bright summer sunshine. She barely felt the ground; all she knew was that the police wouldn't take any action, so she would. She aimed better than any of them that day, catching one in the leg and another in the arm. And when Joelle tumbled to the ground from on top of a getaway horse, she was right there to catch her.
"Jo, oh my goodness Jo! Are you okay? Did he hut you? Where are your parents?" Joelle wasn't even shaken by her encounter - she got straight to her feet and looked around triumphantly. She stared straight at the people gathering rapidly at the scene, as if daring them to call her a troublemaker and a nuisance.
"Fine, they're all fine," she said with the air of a disdainful cowboy. She plucked the cowboy hat straight off of the sheriff's head and glared down upon her captor. "Who's the liar now, Mr Bradshaw?" And she spat on his face.
I hope you guys like my story! It's really different than anything I've ever written before, so it was nice to be extra creative.
