As promised the library’s newsletter contribution will feature a different winning entry in our recent Shalom Literary Wonders poetry and short story writing competition.

We kick off this week with the excellent winning entry from the year 7 & 8 short story category, Lillian T.

The Bridge of Retrospect

By Lillian T.

The Bridge of Retrospect The air is warm and buttery, with picturesque meadows adorned with honeyed flowers emanating saccharine aromas that tickle your nose. You spy a waterfall nearby that glistens enchantingly alongside gigantic sequoia trees and mushrooms that shoot into the sky, disappearing into the clouds above. Wow, you think you could really see anything from up there. You giggle eagerly at the thought. The whole setting seems to radiate some sort of sorcery, and a sense of lushness and fruitful verdancy. Magic.

The fertile plants and the ever-enchanting aura draw you in, pulling you closer, begging you to eat the tantalizingly juicy fruits and pick the almost angelic flowers. But something else seems to draw you in more.

A simple bridge, so plain and dull, made of depressingly colourless bricks of stone that makes the utopia around it seem ten times more vibrant. Strangely, your chest tightens, and your heart seems to beat faster, making your instincts scream louder. Something seems to be calling you, but waiting for you to answer, like it’s holding its breath. A small part of you questions whether you should sate your curiosity.

You look back at the giant trees, the flowers, and the fruits of this paradise tentatively, then turn back to the bridge. A plaque anoints one of the low, ridged walls: The Bridge of Retrospect. You’re too young to know what that word means so you simply shrug and with a deep breath, you step onto its grey surface.

The journey started well, and you’re happy enough skipping across the bridge, eyes roaming the rich amount of life and beauty around you. You’re beginning to like this.

After some time, you get somewhat tired and your jovial pace has been reduced to a lazy stroll but still you admire the scenery and luscious abundance of flora and fauna in the distance, getting further and further away, and you notice the bridge slowly ascending in an uphill slope, getting steeper and steeper, making it harder and harder to waddle up.

Suddenly, you trip over a brick jutting out at a jagged, jarring angle, and you stumble onto lifeless, lacklustre land. Confusion washes over you in chilling waves as you realise that you can no longer see the utopia you just knew; instead, ugly, gnarly roots are spread throughout the coarse dirt like the black-blooded veins now carrying an epiphany through your being.

You look behind you at the Bridge of Retrospect and you finally understand. Though you wish more than anything to go back, it no longer calls you and you no longer know the wide-eyed, wonderstruck ingenue you were all that time ago. Because although you feel as though only minutes have passed, you catch your reflection in a pond of scummy water nearby and recoil at the face of a weary, wistful woman and it makes it real.

You are not the child you once were, and you’ll never know the innocent magic of childhood again.