I wrote five paragraphs today. I ended with 21 total paragraphs. Next step, I’ll stretch 10 of those into 10 pages.

15. On my first day of second grade everyone in Ms. Link’s class had to say what animal they were most like and I, a fidgety child with a habit of storing treasures in my pockets, went with kangaroo. The other kids loved it. Half the class suddenly loved kangaroos best. I rode the wave of that victory for weeks, for years really. I still get a tingle of pride when I picture Billy Williamson’s wide-open eyes and wholly-won-over-to-kangaroos grin. It took more than 20 years and a real kangaroo to teach me something about true persuasion.

16. Basements have a bad reputation, but Jasper’s basement saved everyone in Mrs. Peele’s third period class. It was the year of the Covid, a few weeks before the school’s shut down. Mrs. Peele had mentioned the virus to us in class, but no one but Pearl paid much attention then. It was happening far away and it was just a virus, like the cold, and I was much more focused on the soul crushing suckiness of being dropped by my best friend. That’s how I ended up agreeing to a late night class outing to Jasper’s basement.

17. I’d never admit this to Sherbet, but in my Dad’s shed, I’m engineering a tiny elephant. Sherbet is my little sister and she’s 100% against hybrid animals. I agree with her, mostly. I think people should adopt mutts and stop designing funky dogs. Still, Sherbet will forgive me when she sees Beag, that’s the elephant’s name. Well it will be, when I’m done making him.

18. Last Christmas I nearly drowned in the fountain in Merchants Square. It wasn’t the actual Merchants square, or the actual fountain across from the Moravian bookstore. It was a model in the center of the Putz in Shia Rainstone’s extra living room, and how I ended up an inch tall, doggie paddling for my life in that tiny fountain isn’t even the craziest part. I was there with Shia.

19. Rain against the roof used to help me fall asleep, until the night Pete escaped. The rain started as a drizzle that afternoon. I was dragging out the recycling, and I admit I was annoyed and wearing my headphones. Three hours later, flopped back in my reading bean bag chair, I noticed Petey wasn’t trying to knock my book off my lap, which is usually what he does when I settle down in my bean bag. It was a monsoon by then, but I threw on my coat and red rain boots and spent an hour calling for him. By the time I returned home I could barely breathe from the worry.

20. My ears perked at the sound of the text message jingle. It had to be Liam.

21. When Isla was a girl monsters filled her dreams, and though those nightmares faded as she grew, deep down she was certain something giant and fierce would end her. She didn’t understand the danger of small things. She married Troy because he was a good man, and love grew green between them at first, but they let a word cut here, and a misunderstanding bite there, until both Isla and Troy were nothing but scars. [Love]

Today’s Writing Mission: Turn sentences 9-14 into six more paragraphs, for a total of 15.

9. Jambalaya is supposed to be a supper, but Mama thrust that name on my big brother, which I swear was the start of all my troubles. Mama didn’t even cook Jambalaya, not then and not now. Her people aren’t from anywhere near Louisiana. They’re third generation Pennsylvania Dutch. If you don’t know what Jambalaya is, it’s a dish they say comes from Louisiana, made a little different depending on where the cook’s family came from. Like if you have West African or Spanish roots, you probably used tomatoes. If you’re people were French, Cajun French, maybe you used smoked meat, just browned it, then added the veggies and stock and skipped the tomatoes, because there weren’t any around. It’s a dish made out of what you have on hand. Sounded like junk if you asked me, but Mama called it a masterpiece of necessity. And she said she liked the sound of it.

10.Standing on my son’s porch on my 75th birthday, hiding from Tula and the grandkids, a thought tickled behind my left ear. I didn’t want to go back in, and I had no real desire to go out anywhere either, but that tickle was turning to an itch, and that itch was trying to tell me something. I wondered if I should call Dr. Huff, but I dismissed the thought. This particular affliction could not be cured by a doctor, not even Huff. My ear was calling me to something, and I was four parts irritated, two parts scared, and to my surprise, one part curious.

11.The sunlight gave no warmth, though it shone as bright as ever. I stepped over the massacre of roses and peonies, being careful not to trample on them, though they were goners. I shivered. How could a beautiful day be so cold?

12.Birds didn’t sing, or chirp or tweet in Clovis, but they made a sound, and when you heard it, you either lifted your face to the Stars while your heart filled with love, or you covered your ears and cried. Clovis had one kind of bird, the little, neon-green, Bleeze. It was evening when I jumped off the Pod platform and landed on Clovis for the first time. Evening is when the Bleeze gather at the ponds. Our Pod drop-off was just North of those ponds and as I jumped the sound of the Bleeze stopped my breath. I raised my eyes and watched the ever-present Stars swirl across the sky, so thick my mind tricked me to think I could reach out and touch them. The voice of the Bleeze, sultry and wise, wrapped around me and pierced through me and filled me with a love more real than any I’d felt before, and so pure I could not think of anything else. I’d jumped thousands of times, onto thousands of worlds, but the Clovis jump was the only one I didn’t stick. I broke both my legs, which is how I ended up in Whee’s infirmary.

13.Mother’s Day came like it always did, but this time April didn’t have lunch at the Bethlehem hotel. Her Mother had disappeared three days before, without any hint of where she could have gone. The officer on the case suspected she had taken off. April’s Dad worried she was hurt. April knew they were both a little right, and a lot wrong, but she had no idea how to bring her Mom home.

14. Mourning doves mate for life. Most of the time. Wicked cousin, Tim, who I had considered a genius, told me that the last Thanksgiving all my cousins sat at the kids’ table. it was the year I turned 12. He said that Mourning Doves are so hung up on their mates, that if you separate them, they won’t stop searching until they are reunited. He said he could prove it. After we finished our pumpkin pie, all six of us stood in our Aunt and Uncle’s tidy, little garage looking at a couple of doves trapped in a cage. Wicked Tim had attached an orange tag to their feet, the way he’d learned at his summer job as a lab assistant. He released one of the doves. She flew to the nearest tree. “I’m taking this guy back home with me,” Wicked Tim said. She’ll be in Lansdowne and he’ll be in Boston. He said he’d follow them using the trackers in their tags. Shayla, the only cousin I still talk to, still says Tim had meant for the doves to be reunited. I disagree. Tim was and always has been Wicked.

Today’s Writing Mission: Stretch six more sentences into paragraphs for a total of nine paragraphs, so far.

3. I climbed to the top of the PPL building because I promised, but it didn’t go the way I planned. When I finally made it as far up as the elevators allowed, I stepped outside and pressed myself against the wall. It wasn’t that windy. I’d checked the forecast and picked the least windy day I could find. Still, I needed the feeling of the bricks against every inch of my back. I promised myself I would touch the flag pole. It was the last thing on the list of Must-Dos that Chris and I made on our last birthday, when we turned 14, before everything changed.

4. The day before I turned 13, Charles chopped off his pinky. It ruined my birthday. I mean, he didn’t do it to ruin our trip to Wyoming to climb Devil’s Tower, but it had taken me nearly two years to convince my parents to let me do it, so yeah, I was a little pissed. I did stuff his loose pinky into a plastic baggie and cover it in ice, like they do on hospital shows. I’m not a monster.

5.I’m a little like a sphynx, the friendly, smart hairless cat, not the mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion. I don’t mean I resemble the cat physically, I am a short 13 year old girl with plain old brown hair that only grows to just below my shoulders, no matter how hard I try. I have a three-year-no-cutting streak to prove it. So my hair is not fabulous, but I’m not bald. The sphynx and I have other things in common, though. We’re both hilarious.

6. The day I died the flowers on the mophead hydrangea in our backyard finally returned. The detective assigned to my case didn’t notice. Why would he? Phin noticed, though.

7. I used to think there were two kinds of people in the world, the sunsets and the sunrises, but Prooba showed me the world’s more complicated than that. In the end, Prooba was my wisest teacher, even though she wasn’t meant to be a teacher at all. She was my next door neighbor. Our house was a four bedroom ranch, like most of the other ones in our neighborhood, but Prooba’s was a thin, three-story, the highest home in all of Afton Village. She was tall and thin too, just like her home. I can picture Prooba wearing that ancient blue grey Alsace linen shawl, standing on her third floor deck, watching over our neighborhood like a sentinel.

8. It would have been the perfect summer if Peter hadn’t stepped on that spike in the middle of Smurf Olympics. He did though, so Dad scooped him up and he and Buppy drove Peter to the hospital. I decided to stay home, or maybe they left me behind. The distinction wasn’t important in the drama of that moment, but over time, it has become the most crucial detail of my life.

A Winning Entry in the Official Kidlit Fall Writing Frenzy Contest Submission Page 2019.

The Fire Trees and the Mist
by Melanie Singer
Image #1

Bree’s heart pounded as she scoured the mist for her little brother. She squeezed her eyes shut but couldn’t stop remembering.

“Out Little Pest. Did you not see the sign on the door?” She pointed to her brother’s photo, marked like a No Parking sign.

Wen slipped past her and jumped on her bed. “I’m not leaving until you tell.”

“It’s not for babies.”

“I’m not a baby. I’m five.” Wen grabbed her phone.

“Fine,” she said, sickly satisfied that she’d scare the pants off the Little Pest.

“Hundreds of years ago the Fire Trees and the Mist appeared on the path at the edge of Afton.”
Bree told the whole story, of the fire trees and the mist and the boy who disappeared. When she finished, Wen asked,”Are the trees really on fire?”

Bree tried to ditch him, but he asked a gazillion questions, “Would it hurt to touch them? Who was the boy? Can I go there?” She’d cracked. She took him there to shut him up, but he ran straight through the line of Fire Trees. She couldn’t stop him and when she tried to follow, the trees wouldn’t let her pass.

Wen disappeared.

Melanie Singer – melanieosinger@gmail.com