The Blue is Water

This is set on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, where I spent my childhood. Its a story about the inevitable tide of modernism and growing up in a changing world.

The little girl is walking to school. Her bare feet slap rhythmically against the black road, which hasn’t yet reached the scorching temperatures of midday. She has a set look on her face and ignores her brother’s loud chattering on his mobile phone. All she wants is to finish school, get home and swim for hours in the cool deep river with her friends. A fly buzzes into her face and she flicks at it irritably, it lazily circles her head and lands in her hair. She doesn’t notice the fly, she also doesn’t notice the deafening buzz of cicadas in the towering trees around her and she barely pays attention to the trucks filled to overflowing with a mass of humanity which stream past her and her brother. As she walks the smell of rotting vegetation rises from the ditch next to the road to tang in her nostrils. This smell will be ten times worse when she walks home in the heat of early afternoon, but to her it is just another part of the landscape.

Finally at school she sits quietly, but her mind is elsewhere. It is buried beneath the cool rocks beneath the deep pool, which later she will jump into over and over from the high rocks above, trying to escape the cloying humidity. The teacher is showing them a large piece of paper which he calls a “map”. He tells them that it shows the world as if you were looking down on it from a great height. He says that the green pieces are land and the blue is water. Startled, she realises he is calling her up to show him which green part is the one they live on. Blinking in confusion the girl points to the largest piece of green she can see. The teacher laughs at her and tells her to sit down. She goes, cheeks burning in disgrace, and watches as he points out a small segment surrounded on all sides by the blue that she now knows is water.

When she gets home her mother tells her to help carry food to where her grandmother lives on the next ridge. She knows her mother has been working all morning in the baking sun to dig enough sweet potato for her own family and for her grandparents who are too weak to garden for themselves. She knows that her mother has carried the enormous bag down the mountain on her head, stopping at the river where she washes the ruby red and deep purple potatoes in the clear cold water. A twinge of guilt bothers the girl as she throws her screaming tantrum. She knows her mother will slap her, which she does… a resounding thwack leaving a red mark on soft dark skin.

The girl shifts impatiently in her grandparent’s house which has been blackened and baked by countless fires lit and relit on the cool hard-packed earth. Her mother talks to her grandmother about mundane things; the rain, babies, sickness, brothers, sisters, aunts. Rudely, the girl interrupts to tell her grandmother about the map at school and draws what she can remember in the dirt floor, poking at it with a stick to emphasise her words. Her grandmother laughs at the foolish idea of their whole of Papua New Guinea being as small as a grain of rice in the bright blue sea. Frustrated the girl tries to explain again but is cut short crisply by her mother.

In the tepid afternoon heat she sits beside the cool water hole and imagines that the smooth rocks rising out of the water are huge countries. For a moment she believes she is bigger than the whole world.

Author's Note

This is a story I wrote for an English course I did at uni, its part of a set of three. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated as I am a very inexperienced writer, Thank you!

Reviews

[EylonBear]

This is a very good work. An insight into a different world. For me it is hard to understand what it would be like to not understand a map, so to see it from a different point of view is very interesting. it is very well written, and the grammar is very good. The imagery is amazing as well. The descriptions so life like that you can just imagine it in your mind very easily.

[McKenna]

I really enjoyed reading this! It's so easy to forget how life is for others when you become so focused on your own. The imagery was lovely and I loved the different perspectives you used with the map and how the girl can imagine she's bigger than the world. There were only two things that threw me. The first being this sentence: "It is buried beneath the cool rocks beneath the deep pool, which later she will jump into over and over from the high rocks above, trying to escape the cloying humidity." It was the word order. Maybe "which she will later jump into"? And the use of the word "tepid" which means "lukewarm" when talking about the heat. Maybe a word like "stagnant" or "stifling" unless you do mean that it was becoming cool. Over all, I thought it was very well done!