Scratch

I'll post mine but it's laughable

    The carnival!
    It was only there once a year, for one wonderful week at the beginning of June, after the end of school and before the slow, lazy days of summer. It was merely a shabby collection of orange tents and white-and-red-striped tents; the mismatched bands of street performers and musicians offering their entertainment for the occasional dollar; artists at their stands draped with threadbare curtains; and then the candy, the games, the prizes—especially the prizes. Merely! The last week of school was only a formality. It was, in the eyes of the younger boys and girls, there simply to count off the days until the carnival began. The older ones, who were leaving the lower school, pretended not to care.
    The carnival!
    Most of the children couldn’t take the subway to school by themselves; they were always accompanied by older siblings when they stepped into the train with its wheezing accordion sides, folding, unfolding and folding again. But the carnival was different. They were free then. Many of them promised their mothers that they would stay together, but this promise was traditionally broken. They couldn’t bother about it, not on the week of the carnival.
    The carnival!
    But the clocks were so slow.
    Classrooms full of students, perspiring in their school sweaters—red for the lower school and blue for the high school; as well as an unfortunately bright, repellent mustard yellow for the nursery school—continually checked the time, ground their teeth, tapped their feet and chewed their thumbnails, waiting, waiting, waiting. Maille sat towards the back of the room, fiddling anxiously with her blue hair ribbons. She despised the hair ribbons, but her mother insisted she wear them for the last day of school. She always did, and Maille always got rid of them before she arrived home. This year she had tried to be patient, but they would be gone in time for the carnival.
    The teacher was saying something, but she wasn’t listening. None of them were. One phrase registered. “And I hope that next year will be just as happy and successful.” Next year, next year, next year, happy and successful…“successful,” she vaguely recalled, had been a spelling word. She had missed the second c. Next year, next year. That was infinitely far away. She fingered the place where someone had scratched two letters, presumably initials, into the desk: JN. While she silently listed possible names this could stand for—something she often did unconsciously—the teacher went on to say how sorry she was she couldn’t have this class next year too, every year in fact, and that she was pleased with the nicely illustrated birthday cards they had presented her with last Tuesday (which by curious oversight had somehow ended up in the wastebasket on Wednesday). Oh, she was so lucky to have had them! Her voice took on an edge here, noticing that no one was looking up.
    “So thank you for our nice time together,” she finished anticlimactically.
    They barely had time to give a brief, polite applause and then, at last, it was over. They grabbed their belongings and hurried away, laughing and yelling and shoving as soon as they were out the door. Sometimes, on unhurried afternoons, Maille used to only step on the blue floor tiles and not the green ones, or vice versa. This took a certain amount of deliberate concentration. Today she disregarded them completely and ran with the others, grimy old coins jangling pleasantly in her pockets. After that year she never paid much attention to the floor tiles anymore.
    A train hadn’t yet arrived, so she stopped to catch her breath and make sure all the coins were still there. She did see her brother, Trent, but remembered not to wave. It was carnival day. Trent was thirteen and too old to care. She swallowed her excitement to keep from joining the six-year-olds who were just leaving nursery school, bouncing up and down on their heels. She was only a year older than them, but felt she had to keep this difference noticeable.
    At the subway stations, which many people used to travel to and from work and school, you could go almost anywhere in the city, and, had you familiarized yourself with the network of dark concrete passageways, could take several shortcuts, as well as developing a knowledge of which trains were generally less prone to breaking down and gave smoother rides. Everyone was familiar with it, of course. There were no cars here.
    There were virtual kiosks in which you could purchase snack bars and drinks, as well. These always intrigued Maille, but she had never used one before.
    Eventually the train screamed in, and Maille managed a window seat three rows ahead of Trent. She liked sitting by the window the most, so she could lean against the cold glass and watch the dingy walls and faded signs rush by in the dark and topple against each other like dominoes. And she liked it best alone, on days like today. Her neighboring passengers were a high school student (judging from the blue sweater) and a tall young gentleman wearing an interestingly-patterned silk tie, so she could count on them to say nothing to her. She found others’ conversations worthy of greater attention. On the train that day, she listened to two college students fiercely debating the use of Oxford commas. And everywhere she heard the word “carnival.”
    Back at the station, a pair of sullied hair ribbons lay flattened by many pairs of shoes.

She remembered last year’s carnival very vividly. “Next in line,” someone, whose face she could not seem to conjure up in her memory, had said.
    Maille had stepped forward and unearthed the proper amount of coins from her pocket, then glanced up expectantly. The man at the booth printed her a ticket, his movements mechanical and bored, and pushed it onto the counter. She took it at once and ran her thumb experimentally over the jagged edge. “Thanks—thank you.”
    He didn’t seem to hear. “Next in line.”
    Smiling now, she walked ahead. She had more change than last year left over for carnival games. For the moment, though, she took the opportunity to look and listen. It was extremely pleasurable to watch all the faces disappear and reappear in the crowd, and listen to exchanges of conversation intermixed with the inharmonious sounds of violins and trumpets and guitars; to see scattered tents like peppermint-striped fortresses, and vendors of cotton candy like clouds (that last being only an expression she had heard—Maille had, of course, never seen a real cloud). She liked knowing she could buy almost anything there.
    The carnival was always wonderful. She never could, or would, see the streaks of dust and frayed edges and yellowing corners. No one did.
    She paused, at first, to see the caricaturist’s stand. She had always wanted to be able to draw, really draw, not just the flat simplistic likenesses she penciled in the margins of her grammar notebook, that made the paper turn gray with eraser marks. The caricaturist, however, told her irritably that if she wasn’t going to buy anything she had better be on her way. Undaunted, Maille answered that she was still considering, and walked away in what she hoped appeared to be an indifferent sort of manner. She decided that she didn’t much care for the drawings of the caricaturist, but she did envy the smudged, worn cardboard box of oil pastels.
    “Mal! Come look at this!” called a familiar voice. It belonged, she knew right away, to a red-haired boy in her class, named Jack. Most of her classmates had taken to calling her “Mal,” because it took less time to say. She didn’t mind it.
    “Hi,” she answered enthusiastically, grinning. She hadn’t seen any of her other friends, so it was nice to have found one of them. She shuffled forward uncertainly, weaving her way through a sudden, unexpected rush of students finally finished with school. “What’s going on,” she said, then louder, so he’d hear: “What’s going on?”
    “Come see,” came the impatient reply.
    Maille pushed past the rest of them and stood beside him. Jack, though he was her age, was several inches taller. He had strange eyes like milky green marbles, which currently stared over the top of her head, at the array of dusty glass bottles in a box before them.
    “The ring toss?” she asked, looking at the peeling sign. “How do you play?” She knew, for she had played last year, but Jack liked explaining things.
    “You throw the rings and try to get them over the top of the bottle, and if you get three then you win a prize. But I only got one.” He gnawed absently at his fingernails; he did this so often they were always sad and ragged-looking at the ends. “Want to try?”
    “Maybe.” Maille glanced it over doubtfully. She’d lost twice when she tried the year before. “What do you win?”
    “Over there.” Jack nodded. It was a glass box of water and flickering orange shapes. She looked closer.
    “Goldfish.”
    “Yeah. Think you can win?” he wanted to know.
    Maille shrugged. “I don’t know.”
THEN JACK KILLED HER THE END
because I was too bored to continue

Yup

Wickimen wrote:

The carnival

Actually it was really good!

hungergamesfanatic wrote:

777w wrote:

hungergamesfanatic wrote:

Why does everyone have to give up?

Can't you at least post what you were writing?



Please?

because theyre not rick astley whos never gonna give you up or let you down

Thank you Lieutenant Sarcasm. 

oh yeah that was totally sarcasm and not a joke that wasnt supposed to seem sarcastic at all

I tried and this is not going to work for me
because it turns out that idea i had..
it was crud!

We might host a NaNo group on here in November or something