Turnaround
Suzhou Singapore International School, Tommy Lee Teng Long, Fiction: Group 3
T
he airplane emerged from the clouds, like a bird, making a large arc through the sky.
Suddenly, there was absolute silence.
Aboard the airliner, thirteen year-old Tyson Norton had already evacuated most of
his dinner to the aisle next to him. His black hair stuck to his square face. His gray eyes
searched the cabin. The absence of sound from the two jet engines were no better influence to his
already knotted stomach.
Above the passengers, orange oxygen masks burst out from the overhead carriage, and thus
many made frantic grabs at the dangling masks. Tyson, the only exception, was still busying
curing his stomach to have noticed. As he straightened up, his expression turned into fear. The
passenger next to him had taken his oxygen mask! He was just about to ask the man next to him
to discard his mask when the man went entirely slack, seemingly to have lost con-sciousness. He
spared a glance around the cabin. All the passengers were slumped.
Those oxygen masks must have been meddled with! Tyson thought.
Deciding it was best not to wear a mask, Tyson bent forward and tucked into a emergency
landing position. He could still smell his dinner, which wasn’t helping at all. Beads of sweat ran
down his cheeks.
The aircraft started to meander, and Tyson was tossed back and forth like a dinghy in
extremely rough waves. Emergency lights were flashing about in the cabin.
Tyson grabbed for a pillow, and tucked the pillow under his head. His ears popped, and Tyson
blacked out.
In his dreams, he saw a girl shouting, but the voice seemed to be rather distant. He wanted to
lean closer, but he simply could not move. It sounded vaguely like—
“Réveillez-vous, êtes-vous vivant?”
Tyson opened his eyes, and saw a mane of unkempt blonde hair showering his face, mixed
with ash and dust. As he took a deep breathe, he choked. “French?”
“Ah, you are alive!” Replied the mane of hair in English with a slight French accent.
Tyson blinked a couple of times. In the blue sky, a humanlike silhouette blocked out the
scorching sun.
“Are you all right?” The silhouette told him. “You were ze only survivor I found. By ze way,
my name is Char-lotte. You can call me Lotte for short. Do you want some—”
Tyson wheezed. “Where are we?”
“Hmm, probably somewhere in ze middle of ze Désert de Gobi…” Lotte told him. A sad glint
reflected through her hazel eyes.
“Wait, what?” Tyson took a good look at the girl. She looked exactly like the girl in his dream.
Despite her ash stained face, she was still quite an astonishing sight.
He looked up warily at Lotte. “It’s true that the plane crashed?”
“Oui. Yes, we are ze only survivors… ‘ere, take some water”
Tyson took the many-dented thermos and gulped down the water thirstily, he looked up at Lotte.
“Where did you get the water?”
“I found it in zat stream.” She pointed to the distance. Tyson sat up groggily, and scanned
