Primary Short Story Winner
Ronan Blakey (P6), Kilchuimen Primary, Fort Augustus
HOME
My home is lurking mysteriously on the edge of the desolate moor. He is very protective of his inhabitants but he got a hole in his head playing football with a huge rock. My home lurks.
Who lives in my house? My family lives in my house who are, Freddie the noisy, Ronan the tall, Mungo the annoying, Angus the clever, Becca the blonde, Bella the calm, Dad the angry and Mum.
I can see a nice Mum slaving over a hot stove. I can smell a delicious spaghetti bolognaise in the air. I can taste my mum’s delicate cooking. I can feel a warm feeling going down my back. I can hear Freddie shrieking in the next room.
What does my home feel like? My home is lonely, isolated and safe. My home is lovely, unpredictable and fearless. My home is tired, unlucky and firm. My home is lonely.
Where is my home? My home is my family.
Primary Poetry Winner
Emma Macdonald, (Age 11), Kinlochewe Primary
HOME
My home is in Scotland and that’s where I’ll stay
There’s no other place in the world I’d rather be than in my home
My family and me
My home is so loud and lively but no one seems to care
Our dog barking at any visitors but that’s because she’s being protective
Smells of warm, comforting chicken soup greet me as I walk in from school
My room is messy and muddled, everything is spread out
My home is never quiet, always full of noise, never a silent moment
My home has brothers and sisters squabbling
My home has pets crowding up the kitchen
My home has a family who love each other
Even though we sometimes argue
My home is semi-detached, joined to my cousins, auntie and uncle
My home has the sound of mum playing her guitar
And singing her favourite songs
My home has vegetables growing in a patch
And a shed full of things no one knows about
My home has a warm living room
With a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be done
My home is my favourite place to be
Secondary Short Story Winner
Lexanne Stewart, Gairloch High School
HOME COMING
As I walked up the road to the brooding monster of a house I listened to the hoots and howls from the night creatures. The moon was my only light illuminating everything with an eerie shadow. A dense forest surrounds me from every angle. Up ahead in a small clearing is a building that I have been doomed to stay a night in.
I stop in front of the battered mansion and hope it doesn’t collapse on me during the night. The wind howls through the broken windows, the front door swings freely on its hinges and creaks loudly. The steps leading up to the front door are partly crumbled. I look up at the tower sort of thing that pokes out from either side of the house and think of all the strange things that might have happened here. A clap of thunder and a flash of lightning later and I’m bounding up the steps and closing the door behind me.
The inside is surprisingly tidy and stable, no crumbled stairs or broken furniture all over the place, of course there is the odd book laying on the floor open and the stale smell drifting from every corner, some places may have a rat or two in them. Surprisingly there are pictures black and white and faded but the people in them look happy. A man and a woman (man and wife, I guess) and a boy and a girl both wearing black overcoats (maybe just dark coloured). Out of the corner of my eye I see something flit across the room. I drop the picture and the frame smashes on the floor into many pieces and scares away a group of birds sitting on the window ledge. There are a lot more pictures dotted about the place. This place once housed a happy family. This, as unlikely looking as it might be, was a home once.
By the way, I’m Kyle Anderson. I’m 15 years old and I have been dared by my friends to stay a night in the only gothic house in my village. My mum thinks I’m staying at a friend’s house. One day I will get my revenge, sweet, sweet revenge. I chuckle but it echoes through the whole building so I decide to say everything in my head. I get into my sleeping bag and settle down for the night.
“Kyle, Kyle waken up, I want to show you my home,” sang a little girl’s voice. I spring out of my sleeping bag and run to the door frame, spin on my heels and look to where I was a second ago. My eyes dart all over the place and my tousled and knotted hair sticks out at the back of my head. I search for the owner of the voice but I can’t find her.
“Who are and where are you?” I ask wildly.
“Don’t be scared, Kyle, I only want you to say hello to my friends and to look at my home,” she says as she emerges from the shadows to my left. I spin to look at her and she says, “Isn’t it beautiful?” She lifts her arms up and turns in a slow circle.
“Yes…it is, but still…who are you?” I say cautiously. “My name is Emily Henderson and I’m 10 years old. This is where I lived when I was alive nearly 150 years ago. I love it here. I know it like the back of my hand; all the passages and good hiding places for when me and my friends play Hide and Seek.”
“OK…cool, so where are….your friends?”
“Oh, you, know, hiding from you, they’re scared of you,” she answers, as if this was an everyday conversation we are having. “Are they? Well they shouldn’t be,” I say. I have decided to trust her. She seems no different from what a living 10-year old girl would be like. “I know. They want to get to know you better. I told them you would stay with us. Make this your home, we can be your family now, Kyle. We can love you. Please make this your home now, Kyle.” Her eyes are boring into me with such intensity that I think there might be a hole between my eyes. She’s not pleading though. It’s….it’s as if she knows what my answer will be, as if she’s sure I will say yes. I want to say no. I try with all my might to say it but it just doesn’t exit my mouth. The words that escape from my mouth are a surprise to me but not to Emily. I find myself saying, “Yes, of course I will stay with you.” I take her hand in mine and say, “Show me your new home!” A flash of light erupts from the wall and Emily says, “Follow me, Kyle.” Emily dragged me towards the light. We step through the portal and I feel slightly disorientated on the other side. I look up and find the grimy faces of four children looking at me wearily. One of them, about Emily’s age, speaks up and says, “Welcome home, Kyle, you’ll love it here.”
I walk around the room and I have a weird feeling of belonging.
“Finally home,” I say.
Adult Short Story Winner
Lisa MacDonald
HOME EXPERIENCE
She is only half listening to the rumble and roar, the thick clack followed by the rolling and finally subsiding bubble. Some kettles boil slowly and some are surprisingly quick; some take ages, so long you go off the idea of tea altogether.
The view from the kitchen window is always important and often surprising; the eyes to the soul of the home, you could say. She sweeps with her gaze the bleak, empty and barely green hillsides across the loch. Winter is coming. She can see it in the weight of the sky, the purple, ashen clouds and the viciousness of the wind bending the hawthorns against themselves.
She shudders and begins, in the hollow, clock-ticking silence, to look for the teabags. They’re usually not hard to find; people like their lives to be simple, or their kitchens at least. They want their tea when they want it. A cupboard to the left of the kettle, normally. Sometimes the right, but less often. Mostly higher up. Which is odd, she thinks. She supposes the idea is to hold the kettle with the right hand and fetch the tea with the left but really you need two hands to do it so now you have to reach across the hot steam. Makes you wonder.
Some people have matching sets of three or four caddies, helpfully labelled and set in a line along the back of their clean, black counter. Full marks for those; they certainly make it easier. Quicker too, and less banging of cupboard doors. Although it’s not as interesting; not much choice. A cupboard stuffed full of half-used boxes and packets makes for a more exciting experience, a learning opportunity, even. Lapsang Souchong, who would have thought!
People's fridges are more personal, even in the matching-caddy homes. Tell you a lot, they do. Wensleydale. And pâté. And fancy stuff she has never even heard of. Some people keep their fruit in the fridge. And their bread, too.
She is careful never to touch anything except the milk. People notice these things. Nobody would ever miss a teabag or a drop of milk, but cut into their cheese and they see it right away. Everyone has their own, unique way of cutting it, you know. Some people cut perfect, thin slices. Some cut the corners off first. Some diagonally. Everyone has a slightly different way of angling their knife. People notice.
Ornaments and pictures are dangerous. You can look, sure, but you never touch. People notice the slightest change in angle. Not everyone does, that's true. There are homes where you just know, from the moment you're in, that they can hardly remember what things they have, never mind where exactly they left them. Where there are shoes on the floor and sofa cushions that don't match and books stacked leaning in corners and so many notes and postcards tucked into picture frames that you can barely see the paintings. Those homes give her an odd feeling, like an echo of a memory she thought she once had. But they have their own dangers. You move a picture on the mantelpiece even just a fraction of an inch and it leaves a clear line in the dust and once you've disturbed it you can never make it right again. You just have to hope they don't notice till the dust gets the chance to cover your tracks or that they'll blame the children, or the cat. She found this out once when she unthinkingly picked up a framed photograph to imagine herself amongst the beautiful, smiling family.
Same with the tea towels - everyone has a special way, which is The Only Way, to fold them or hang them up and you have to watch out for that. She likes the sort of home where tea towels are flung carelessly over the backs of chairs or dumped in crumpled, damp piles on the corners of worktops. The carelessness isn't real, isn't the whole story. There's so much attention to detail, so much stuff collected together, so much thought. So much love, she thinks. So much to see.
This home is the kind where they fold the towel exactly in half and then hang it from the exact middle of the oven door handle. Still, it has to be braved. Once her tea is either cold or finished and the home has been explored in every drawer and detail (she likes to think of it as an 'experience', a 'sampling' rather than an intrusion; for she leaves almost no trace and takes nothing except a small, unimportant token - a candle, a clothes peg, a fridge magnet, just something to remember by) she always washes her cup meticulously, wiping away every last smudge of her lipstick. Then she dries it and puts it away where it came from. She checks the bin, the worktops, the sink and wipes away any drips or spills. She folds the towel and replaces it carefully in its exact right place. As she lets herself out she checks her watch and wonders if there is time for one more Home Experience before she has to catch the bus back to the city and the Shelter.
Adult Poetry Winner
Lynn Valentine
Progeny
Build a house from the heather
Bind the blinds with sea foam
Tile the roof with silk feathers
Ring the rafters with bone
Stitch cold kindling from cobwebs
Gather dust for fire-flame
Pick blue dew drops for bed clothes
With wild yew trees stake claim
Sew a rug with seamed sunlight
Glean a pot with gold gloss
Cast a candle from starlight
Fill a bed with green moss
Let the grey ghost of our child
Echo in the round rooms
Playing with shadows and smiles
Beyond my barren womb