The first of our runners-up in the Literary Wonders writing competition is a short story from the yr 7-8 category called Something Even ‘Abracadabra’ Can’t Fix. This composition penned by Lilian T. highlights the roller-coaster of emotions and anxieties through the lens of the younger teen in a busy family dynamic.

Something Even ‘Abracadabra’ Can’t Fix

They say it’s difficult, saying ‘magic words’ like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.

You’ve learned that your family has no magic words.

You remember a time in your childhood when the sound of your mum’s laugh was still familiar. It wasn’t anything spectacular – no magical chiming sound that anyone would really write about – but it was there, and it was real. These days, it’s seldom-seen smiles scattered here and there, cutting comments carving craters in your self-esteem, and strung-out silences saturated with unsaid things. The walls of your childhood home stare at you with scorn, adorned with the accomplishments of your sisters. Where’s mine? You cringe in bitter spite. It only reminds you that you’ve never even had a piece of paper with your name on it.

Everyone romanticises the idea of being the youngest child, yet you’ve never once had the sweet taste of fleeting favouritism. Nowadays, you’re labelled as cold and quiet, which makes sense, since the magic of childhood rarely bothered to offer its brittle hand to you, that caged little girl hidden in the murky depths of your sisters’ suffocating shadows.

And even though your sisters have moved away, they’re somehow still the most interesting thing about you. Everywhere you turn, you face a question about them, so you’re left with no choice but to go back to the place where it’s just you, Mum, and Dad in a house too big to run from, yet too small to hide in.

You also remember a time when your dad would hit the spiders in your bedroom for you, a sure punishment for their simple existence, and you championed him as a hero, childish as you were. Not that you’ve changed all that much.

To be honest, you’re still scared of the same things, for the most part – the dark, spiders, and making your mum angry, to name a few – but it’s a little different now.

Now, the spiders run kind of rampant, and the webs of lies entangle even the most innocent conversations; you discover that your fear has only grown. You hear crunches under your feet and glance down to see eggshells lining the cold, tiled floors. Over the next few years, you will walk over these same eggshells over and over again, and you will come to know the way they stab at your soles. It’s a feeling that will be foreign and familiar all at once: a sure punishment for your simple existence.

And it’s this feeling that fuels the realisation within you that the magic of childhood fades with time, and that even though you ‘ve learned to like the silence, you’ve grown to hate the house of cards that you grew up in because day after day, you are reminded that there can’t be any ‘magic words’ in a house where there really aren’t many words at all.