The Fortunate Find
The International School of Macao, Natalie Leong, Fiction: Group 2
I
woke up, petrified, to the sound of terrified screams all around me. I rushed out of the house,
expecting to feel the sun’s warm rays on my face, but instead of that pleasant feeling, rough
sand was whipping and whirling all around me. I gasped. It was a sandstorm that had come
from the Gobi Desert behind the Shangba Village, where I lived. Where were my parents and
my sister, Lian? Before I even had time to look around, I was tripped by another confused villager
and fell head first onto the ground, immediately unconscious and enveloped in total darkness.
When I regained my senses, the desert stretched all around me as far as I could see. Not a
single person was in sight, but as I looked around more closely, I saw a shadow in the distance. It
was the silhouette of a girl. I ran towards her. “Are you alright?” I asked anxiously. She looked up
in surprise and said, “Yeah. What just happened?”
“I think it was a sandstorm.” Not knowing which way to go, we decided to stay together and
began our journey in the Gobi.
Soon, night fell and we felt exhausted from an entire day of laborious walking. As we sat
down to rest, she told me that her name was Annchi.
“Where are you from?” I asked her.
“Shangba Village.”
Before I even had time to tell her that I was from the same village, she fell asleep. As I turned
away to take a closer look at my surroundings, I noticed a tiny wooden hut. An enticing smell
of freshly baked bread lured me towards it. Maybe someone inside could offer us some food and
water! I pushed the door open and was greeted by an elderly woman. She smiled kindly and
handed me a cup of tea.
As soon as I reached out, everything disappeared. “HEY!” I shouted.
“What is it?” asked Annchi startled.
“I think I had a hallucination,” I said sadly. Feeling sorry for me, she gave me a hug, a hug
that we both needed. Soon we both fell asleep.
Suddenly, we were awakened by the hiss of a snake.
It didn’t look like any snake that I had seen before. My instinct told me to run. So I took off
with Annchi at my heels. The snake was slithering behind us, getting closer and closer. I plunged
into a sand dune, with sand shifting ceaselessly all around me. I had a final glimpse of the snake
before, to my greatest astonishment, it turned into human and vanished!
Slowly, I crawled out of the sand dune, pondering at what had just happened. “Did you see
that?” I asked Annchi perplexed.
“The snake? Of course!”
“I can’t believe that it turned into a human!”
“What? Human? What are you talking about? Are you hallucinating aaggaainn?”
With a heavy sigh, wishing that I wasn’t the only one who had seen the snake transform, I
trudged onwards.
We had not had any water for a long time and were desperately in need for it when Annchi
shouted, “There’s a plant over there! There must be water nearby!”
Using our already coarse hands, we wildly wrenched the plant from its roots, scooping away
