The Day It Happened...

This is something I wrote a year and a bit ago for English coursework, but it is based on a true story :) Enjoy!

I was only about five and a half years old at the time, honest. Anyway, when you’re that young anything and everything can be fun, including cutting whatever comes across your path up with a pair of blunt scissors.  With my thumb and forefinger squeezed through the miniscule holes in the handles, I chopped a piece of eye-burningly fluorescent pink paper into about fifteen messy pieces, a wide, slightly crazed grin plastered across my pale and still babyish face. I was loving this. This was easily the most fun I’d ever had, at that age at least.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a fat elastic band, and a small roll of Sellotape.  I had no idea where it had come from; I was certainly not trusted with things like those at that age, and for good reason too. Aha! I thought. I’ll cut the elastic band up, and then stick it back together! Oh yeah, that would be awesome…

Clumsily, my chubby little fingers worked to get the elastic band into the open scissors. When it was finally in place, I forced my thumb and forefinger back into and the handles and closed my eyes tightly, thinking that it would add to the excitement that was already fizzing and bubbling violently deep inside of me. I squeezed the handles together. Nothing happened. The elastic band had evaded the blades. Darn! I repeated the action, over and over, and still nothing happened. Furiously, I opened my eyes, and saw that a small cut, a fracture, if you will, had been made. Not wanting my experiment to fail, I kept going with the scissors for at least another minute, until finally the band was broken. I was left with a strip of elastic.

Grabbing the Sellotape, I ripped a bit piece off, removing it from the rest of the roll with one of my incisors (I had recently lost my two front teeth). I lay it down on the matted blue carpet of my bedroom floor, my gravestone-grey eyes twinkling faintly. After carefully arranging the ends of the elastic band onto the Sellotape, I wrapped the tape around the band and picked it up. With the repaired band held in both of my hands, I gave it an experimental stretch. The ends of the elastic band merely slipped out from the tape. I repeated the process with a heavy sigh, as if I spent my entire life doing the same tedious task, except this time I wrapped the tape around much, much tighter. And yet the second stretch yielded nothing but the same results as the first one.

“MUMMY!” My screeching voice echoed through my door, down the stairs and right into the ears of my unsuspecting mother. She ran up the stairs and into my room with a speed similar to that of a certain insane ginger cat who has just heard the cat food cupboard opening. She shot me an expectant look.

“I cut my favourite elastic band in half…”

Both of my parents and my elder brother were now stood inside my room. I looked up at them sadly, holding the remains of the elastic band in my sweaty hands. In perfect unison, as my remorse filled words forced their way out of my mouth, their worried, anxious expressions broke into wicked grins, their eyes flashed, and a chorus of loud, carefree laughter erupted from them, and began bouncing around the room joyfully.

Never, even to this very day, have I felt so angry. Bitter tears fell from my eyes, like dead leaves from a tree; they were shallow and filled with nothing but hatred and fury. My feet grew warm. I don’t know why, but they always do when I get angry. Such inexplicable feelings I felt at that moment, that even what I remember is only a ghost, a shade of what it was really like. I was angry. No, more than that. I felt betrayed.

“I HATE YOU! YOU’RE RUINING MY LIFE! YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ME!” I screamed, the emotion in my voice sending fresh floes of strength around my body. My loud stamp echoed around the entire house. Everything stopped, suspended in that awful moment… And then I flung myself between my mother and my brother, and through the door, slamming it shut with them inside my room on the way out. The door came off its hinges, leaving everyone behind me amazed.

The hole was still shallow, but I gently placed the elastic band inside it anyway. As I scraped the earth back on top of the makeshift grave, I said a few words, my voice wavering.

“Mr. Elastic Band… I know we weren’t always the best of friends, and there were SOME PEOPLE who you just didn’t get on with…” I glared over my shoulder at my parents, ”You’ll be in a better place now, but we’ll all still really miss you.”

R.I.P

Mr Elastic Band