Duckie

Abraham was hungry. He hadn't eaten anything for several days, he was cold, wet and feeling down. "Oh, why must autumn always come? Can't it be summer for ever?", he thought while standing on a small rock. The rock rose from the deep water around it, there were no other rocks around, just this one. In fact there was nothing else around but blue, cold water. And the sky of course.

"Well, must continue. Must travel a long way before I can settle my feathers on an appropriate ground.", he talked to himself, jumped into water, run a few yards, and ascended into the sky.

Abraham wasn't his real name, some big people just called him that. Actually his name was Qvuaagck, but people always called him "Abraham", despite how much he tried to repeat his real name to them. This behaviour might have been because of his hair, why everyone called him by that stupid nickname. Hair? Yes, hair! On his head there were no feather, as there are on other ducks, but only some gray, cold fur. It was a small problem to him, but usually it didn't matter, not now anyway.

Qvuaagck's wings flapped day in day out, rhytmically carrying him nearer and nearer to him destination. He would be late, but "better late than never", he thought. That was quite a common phrase among ducks.

Last summer hadn't been gentle for Qvuaagck. Two of his wife's children had died soon after their birth. His wife had vanished mysteriously when she had been sitting on some kind of branch one day. They had been weird branches, straight as the horizon and as long as the horizon as well. One other thing was that Qvuaagck's feathers had begun to fall down. This had been happening since he had been searching for food for his children in a place where stone trees were burning and black water ran out from huge metallic, cubic hills.

"Maybe the next year will be better. Let's hope so.", Qvuaagck thought while scanning the surface of the sea, trying to find some fish, land, rocks, anything. He did it all with hope, but he didn't know that there really wasn't any. Not in this world. Not any more.

					Marko Grönroos
					English essay 14.10.1988
					Ranking: goody bravissimo

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