Short Story Competition!

The Park Bench

by Chantelle (Year 10)

I would sit on the right side of the same bench each time outside Mum’s favourite shop while she looked around inside. I knew that at first she found it hard leaving her only child, a ten year old outside in the hustle and bustle of busy New York but I hated shopping more than I hated using public toilets. Every few minutes she would make her way out to the front window of the shop and look out to where I was sitting to make sure I was alright. I was different to everyone else my age - I had these little habits, these little quirks; like always sitting on the right side of buses and benches. Then there was the counting – I had to eat my Cheerio’s in groups of five and I had to organise my clothes in groups of five. I’m not like the others, even I know it. My Father always told me I was special.

I was born to draw; I didn’t really seem to be good at anything else so drawing was what made me happiest. I loved art – drawing and all. What I did was capture a vision of New York everyday from a different perspective. That was the thing about New York; everyday was different.
‘It was an artist’s delight’ that’s what my Dad would say.
He was a sculptor. He was born to sculpt. He was my inspiration, my role model and my hero.

Everyone said that I was a spitting image of him, of my father. We had similar personalities as well; my mother had told me that it was because I took everything that he said as gospel.
I think that he was proud that I loved art as much as he did. He had always wanted me to follow in his footsteps. I remember walking through The Met with him when I was eight, listening intently to his interpretations of each work that we past; but there was one thing he told me that day that I’d never forget. It was a quote by Vincent Van Gogh - ‘The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.’  

We used to sit at the window of our apartment looking out over New York and work together until the sun went down; his scalpel cutting the soft clay and my pencil scratching against the crisp white paper of my precious sketch book.
He would tell me ‘Capture the feelings of New York, capture the emotion, capture the commotion, capture the smells’
‘The smells!’ I would say giggling.
‘Yeah, the wonderful mix of cigarette smoke, Starbucks and fumes from the waiting cars.’ 

Now I can’t talk – it’s like my vocal chords are paralysed. I can’t sleep properly either. I can’t do anything without my father.
It’s been nine months and eleven days since he left that morning to go to one of his special meetings in the tall building in the heart of the city.
It’s been nine months and eleven days since we got that phone call.
It’s been nine months and eleven days since the twin towers collapsed.

A few weeks ago I found a new bench to sit on; on the right side of course. It was in the middle of Central Park, the part people walked through to clear their heads. Every day I would walk there and pour my heart out through my pictures into my sketch book. Soon all I could do was draw. I experienced feelings of hatred towards the people who had done this to my dad, to my family, to me.  Even though I knew there were so many other people who were going through the same thing as me, it didn’t offer any consolation.  I had lost my best friend and there was absolutely no chance that he was ever going to come back to me.
I was losing my words quickly – first it was the simple ones like ‘I’ and ‘it.’ Then it was the harder ones like ‘incredible’, ‘suddenly’ and even my own name, ‘Nicholas’. It’s not that I couldn’t talk, I just didn’t want to. Mum thought it was my way of grieving; I could tell she was finding it hard to deal with. She was never like Dad in that way, although she loved me she just didn’t understand me. I knew she wished that I was like the other kids; I could detect the venom in the smiles she gave passing families with perfect children who smiled, jumped and laughed like I should have.      

I would sneak out of school each day during recess and trudge through the fallen autumn leaves to my new bench. I had been drawing the story of my grieving. The pictures were like words to me, words that only I understood. I took on my task with passion and fervently portrayed my feelings through my pencil for hours on end; each day longer than the last. It was just like Van Gogh had said, but for me the only time that I felt alive was when I was drawing. On the last day, as I was nearing the end of one of my last sketches I felt a sudden surge of sadness, my fingers started to tremble and I lost grasp of my pencil. I felt the long thin shape run through my fingers as tears started welling in my eyes. But before the first tear could fall, as I reached down for my pencil I saw some words carved into the rough wood of the bench. They were very wonky and hard to interpret so I guessed that there were thousands of things that they could mean. My finger lightly ran across them a few times and a large part of my feelings of sadness, hatred and grief lifted off my shoulders and a warm feeling flowed into my chest.
‘You are an artist’s delight’ I had whispered quietly as I read the wonky letters.