The Journey (Selected for national writing competition)

Hello! I am a little minnow. I have always dreamt of having a better home. I have lost lots of my loved ones since the invasion of the big bellied monsters. My grandmother told me they were called boats before one captured her. Every day, I will see sardines, prawns, shrimps and sharks being caught.

So I swam off. Not knowing I was headed downwards, I continued swimming and following the path of corals……….. Into the twilight zone. After a while, I started to feel uneasy. The corals no longer lighted my path. All that was left of the corals were bones. Only little light from the sun streamed through the waves of water from above. I turned away from the sight of bones that littered the seabed to get away from the sight of it.

But instead of finding the coral bed I came from, there was a large gulper eel! So this was my doom, to die in this dreadful place. Or was there a way out? I looked up. Yes! A plan started to form in my mind. Just as the gulper eel closed in, I turned vertically and paddled my tail furiously. Every scale, very muscle screamed at me to paddle upwards. My tail was paddling so fast that I felt I was flying. My gills were bursting!

Just then, I saw a Portuguese man-o-war. Its deadly tentacles trailed down towards me. I swerved around it. The eel tried to do it too, but in its haste, it got entangled in the tentacles on the jellyfish and got stung badly. I saw the limp body of the eel sink to the bottom of the abyss below. Though, I continued my search swimming aimlessly in the middle of nowhere. I decided to take a rest and sleep. Anyway, the full moon already is high in the starry night sky.

The next morning when I woke up, another minnow was staring at me straight in the face. She was beaming. “So you finally woke up?” she asked me. “Yep. Where are we?” I asked. I knew it was morning but it was dark. “A whale.” She said very calmly. I started to panic. “Whoa, cool down, we’re not going to die here,” She said, “We’ll get out, trust me. You see those holes up there?” I looked up and saw two oval holes. I nodded “When the whale comes up to breathe, just stay in the water vertically up. That way, you can be blown through a hole easily!”

While we waited for the whale to surface, I learnt that she was called Miti and she often rides in whales. Just then, the water started to drain away. “Prepare to be ejected out of the whale.” She said turning vertically up. I did the same. “Swoosh” We were blasted out of the whale in a spurt of water. We seemed to hover in the air for a while before plummeting back into the sea.

Cold hands of the water rose to greet me. When I opened my eyes, I was amazed to see that I was in a paridise like none other. Corals of every colour surrounded Miti and I. Tropical fish of every kind came to greet us. Surgeonfish, stingrays, angelfishes and Moorish idols welcomed us in. We chose a soft shady spot in the corals to live in, to raise our babies. And here we are still, in this little paradise of ours.