*Watty's 2021 Shortlist*
Samantha Roberts and Ben Evans have one thing in common - they both attend Sir Robertson's School for the Gifted, an elite boarding school for the children of the world's wealthiest. Both scholarship students, they gravitate...
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I'm in pieces.
My insides are my outsides. My heart lays somewhere to the left, beating out a steady rhythm:
Find me, it pleas. Find me.
My thoughts lay scattered like discarded nutshells, and my eyes are shadowed, too overwhelmed to do anything but blink.
My body is a mass of knick-knacks and junk-drawer leftovers, things that once fit together but are now left to ruin.
I am a girl made of spare parts and forgotten languages, and I am on fire.
My lungs burn with molten lava that drip, drip, drips its way down my throat. My bones are liquid steel, simmering with pain and knowledge, my muscles form coils of wire, red hot and strung tight.
The ticking noise from the clockwork of my heart grows faint. I swim in the silence, caged by the confines of my body and held aloft by darkness.
I sink into my bed of nothing, drawing the sheets of night over me.
I am a girl of spare parts and forgotten languages, and
