A Stray Essay

[ Sarah and me had something of a challenge going. We each gave the other a prompt and had to write a short piece on it. The prompt I gave her was perfectly reasonable and produced a pretty solid piece found HERE. She told me to write with a child main character, 8 or under, on his first day of school.

Two weeks and many, many headdesk's later, I scrapped idea #7 in favor of the below. I literally cannot write from a child's POV, and won't be doing it ever, ever again if I can help it. This one's really short, but these 500 words have more angst poured into them than anything I've written in ages. ]

About Me
by Anthony O'Toole

My name is Anthony and I am seven years old. This year I'm starting the third grade.

Mom says third grade is when you go from little kid to big kid. But I was a big kid since the first grade when my Nana went to heaven. I know because Mom said to me one night when I woke up with bad dreams that I was a big kid now that I knew about life and death. But I don't know if she is right because I was playing ninjas and soldiers way before that and people were always dying.

So I don't know if I'm a big kid before or gonna become one. I know that third grade looks really hard because it has times and stuff like that. Maybe timesing makes you a big kid.

I grew up with Nana and Mom in Nana's house in Kentucky. We had a swing on the tree. Mom always said it was like Mayberry but I don't really know what that means, because our town was called Sweetwater. I liked it there most times but it was small and I wanted some kids to play with. I asked for a brother or sister a few times before Nana told me to hush up about things like that. Probably because I don't have a Daddy and only kids with Daddies get brothers and sisters.

Its okay though because I really don't want Mom to have a baby because if she did she'd get a big stomach and wouldn't play with me as much any more. Most nights when she gets back from work we'll go to the playground or go roller blading and if she had that stomach I'm pretty sure she wouldn't want to do those things. Nana said that when I was in her stomach all she did was throw up a lot.

Last year Nana went to heaven and we moved here. Now we live in an apartment which is closer to the playground but not as big. But there are interesting people in these apartments, too. One of my neighbors is from New York City. I think New York City sounds like an interesting place to go. Mom says she went there when she was younger and that it was big and noisy. Nana used to say that Mom was a small town girl at heart.

This year I'm hoping to make some new friends. Since we moved here I haven't met any other kids yet to play with. Playing with Mom is okay, but when I'm not with her I'm at the daycare place and its just a bunch of babies there. Mom said once school starts I'll meet somebody and find a good friend.

This school is so much bigger than my old school. I was kind of scared seeing all the kids. My other school only had 75 kids in kindergarten-6 and now there are 75 kids just in my grade. I'm not sure who I should talk to. There are so many people!

Mom says that the bigger school will show me more of the world. I think all schools teach you the same world because otherwise they wouldn't be very good schools, so I'm not sure she's right or not. It is only the first day and I am new here so many this is a bigger world than the one at Sweetcreek.