Candy and the Bottle
A Short Story
It started one morning when I was eleven. I was at my friend's birthday party jumping on a trampoline. With every jump, I could see something glinting in the long grass in the overgrown field beyond the garden fence.
The sunlight seemed to sparkle off a shiny object and like a magpie, I was drawn to it. Without a word to my friends, I bounced off the trampoline and climbed over the fence. With my inbuilt radar set to ‘sparkle’, I trudged through the overgrown shrubs and nettles searching for the source of my attraction. And there I found a bottle.
It seems strange to me now considering most eleven-year-olds wouldn’t find a bottle interesting, but somehow it called to me. It spoke to the wonder of my soul.
Now, this was no plain Bottle. It was of bright blue glass and it was bejeweled in a wonderful but quite superfluous way. Even as a child I knew that. Its lid was wide and appeared to be of gold, but that couldn’t be, could it? Maybe just some shiny metal to go with the colored stones around it. Still, strange as it was I liked it, and so I took it. I slipped off my jacket and carefully wrapped the bottle within its protective confines and ran home.
I hid the bottle in the back of my wardrobe and went back to the party, arriving just in time for ‘pass the parcel’. I couldn’t…
