I rediscovered my eighth grade portfolio from my Language Arts (read: English) class. I thought it would be fun to take a dive in and read some of the short fiction stories I used to write. After all, I advertise myself as a “lifelong writer of fiction of all kinds,” so why not share my roots?

We’ll start off with a lighthearted one. It’s untitled, but my teacher wrote at the top: “Your brain is always an adventure,” which I think sums up the piece quite well. I for sure did not read it after hand-writing it in about five minutes, and I’m not sure why I included it at all honestly. But here it is, transposed, circa 2010:

Once upon a time there was a waffle. He later got eaten, so that story isn’t particularly relevant. Or interesting.

The story that matters, however, is the story of a smallish whale that lived about 8,563 miles away from the spot where the waffle was eaten. Yes, this whale lived right off of an island in the Southern Indian Ocean, named Kerguelen. This whale actually had 3 children, who had children, who had children, who had great grandchildren, who had great great grandchildren, who had great grandchildren, who had great great great great great grandchildren, one of whom mated with a kookaburra, thus creating the first kookawhale in existence.

The whale’s friends got ideas and started making more kookawhales so that the kookawhales would have more kookawhales and so on.

But that hasn’t happened yet.

Anyway, there was a certain kookawhale who didn’t fit in with the other kookawhales because of his fetal alcohol syndrome. One of his arms was lame and smaller than the other. He had no hair and he was mute. His tail was longer than most and just dragged around and collected dirt and fleas. None of the other kookawhales wanted to be friends with him. His entire life he would live like this.

Fortunately, however, he would soon be eaten by a rather large meat-eating albatross. This was because apparently he looked like a fish-bird, the offspring of a bird and a fish, who had somehow made a home together under the impossible circumstances. The point is that he looked like a bird-fish, so the man-eating albatross ate him.

The end.