Stories.

My little sister Emma writes stories in her first grade class. Here are three I can't stop thinking about.

(Title: The Magic Apple)
Once there was a apple tree. All the apples were ripe. Exept one...one was still a flower blossom. When all the other apples fell down the late bloomer was ripe by then...but it didn't fall down like the others, it took 5 years, then it fell down. Somebody found it and put it in their pocket. That person was sad.

(Untitled)
It's the night before Easter. I can hardly wait. But when I went to bed that night I woke by a crash. In what a crazy sight I looked then I saw the Easter Bunny! I know I saw him. He was standing in the living room hiding baskets, I took out my camra made it zoom. I went down stairs and told him my name. Then he shrunk and he shrunk but his face looked the same.

(Untitled)
Once there was a black cat...but this cat could talk. One day a girl named Lily came along and found the cat. She gave it a name...his name was Blacky. She took him home. Her mother said she could not keep him, but her father let her. She was so so happy. She played with him every second of the day. But one day Lily and her family went on a vacation but cats were not aloud. So they had to leave him. He was so hungry that he died.

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In "The Magic Apple," the eponymous apple's magic is not the fairy blessing typical of traditional children's tales; rather, the apple forces its finder to mourn for the late bloomer that took so painfully long to fall. Metaphorically, this imagery calls to mind Cormac McCarthy's The Road. After a presumed nuclear holocaust, a father and son wander the deserted, melted roads, scavenging food and shelter to keep themselves alive. As the story opens, the man and the boy, along with a handful of other humans who roam the country as lonely pilgrims or inhuman cannibal gangs, have survived the destruction that knocked down all the other apples. The boy is a "late bloomer" but matures fast; his situation is such that "when all the other apples fell down the late bloomer was ripe by then." He is one of the last children left, and his aging father is saddened by the fact that once old age claims him, the boy will be left alone. Initially, the boy and the man do not "fall down like the others," but after a few years fighting for his child's survival, the man passes away and the boy is picked up by a rare roving family not unlike his own. They pick him up and put him in their pocket with mixed emotions, knowing they too will soon die and leave the otherwise defenseless children to fend for themselves.

The imagery at the end of the second story would be chilling enough as prose, but the rabbit's supernatural behavior is intensified by presenting the action in a rhyming couplet.

And in the third story, the fact that the cat is able to talk does not save him.