When I was in year 9, at the tender age of 14/15, I was big into writing, and at the time, I was deep in my horror writing phase. An old friend from high school recently found a story of mine that had been printed in the yearbook, and I found it so disturbing/funny that I thought I’d share.
It was titled ‘I’ll be back’, which is relevant considering where I live now. And it revolved around a 14/15 year old girl babysitting her two year old sister for the first time. This girl was doing all the standard teenage things you do when you’re babysitting – like calling her friends and watching TV… absolutely not checking on the baby and of course… meditating… for an hour. Which perhaps was the problem… because in that hour someone came into the house and surprise surprise… murdered her baby sister.
But it’s not the murder of the baby sister that had me raising my eyebrows upon reading it back. It’s the detail into which I went into it. Because apparently, my 14 year old self, decided that it would be optimal if the killer severed the baby’s legs… and then… put them in the microwave!
In retrospect it’s slightly funny but also mildly disturbing. And it got me wondering what on earth the school was thinking publishing it in the yearbook? I guess it was well written for my age… I was writing like mad at the time and it’s possible I’d won a competition and that’s why it was in there.
I think somehow these days if a student submitted a story like that they might be given a talking to. At the very least it’s probably no longer considered appropriate to print for the entire school community. Yep, I’m going to say it – things were better back in the good old days. Interestingly, despite the fact that I wrote stories like this one, and many others in the same vein, I was not a disturbed child. There is nothing sinister here. But if you read this story and others like it I was producing at the time, and combine it with my dirty poem phase, I think you could be forgiven for thinking the worst.
Still, here I am. Not disturbed. No childhood trauma to speak of. I grew out of both my dirty poem and my graphic horror writing phase, with barely an eyelid batted. Next time I head back to my parents in Oz I must take a look through my old high school journals and see what other gold I can unearth!
an aussie in austria 