Kendall Kulper

I stretched out on the carpet, eyes glazed over, my heart whirring with frustration and fear, and as my mother__ curse slowly, firmly, pushed my eyelids closed, my body went still. But on the inside I was screaming.

Cursed, I was cursed, and my mother said she__ given up magic for good, said it was a terrible thing, but she wasn__ above using it to keep me at her side, and she__ a hypocrite, a liar, a fraud and phony, and I hate her I hate her I hate her!

Just because it's common doesn't make it less powerful.

The ocean turns cold, dark, pressing around me, but the deeper I go the more the iron inside of me twists and pulls and I know that I__ tethered to the boat, that even now the men pull the rope tighter and drag me back to the surface.

Hope _ that silly, stupid creature that lived within me, no matter how often I tried to beat it to death _ lifted its nose and sniffed at the air.

The sky would be clear, colorless, mist blending together the air and the ocean, the waves whispering against the rocks.

I am swimming and it is just sunrise, the sky so gray as to be almost invisible. I rise to the surface to breathe and that__ when I see the dark shadow of a boat, gliding gently toward me in the water. Men ride in the boat, their faces grim and greedy and silent, and as I turn to watch them I feel a bite in my side, a piercing pain.

I was sixteen, still my mother__ prisoner, the night I became the whale.

This will be the night I escape. The thought repeated in my mind like a refrain, over and over, and I believed it so hard that I whispered it aloud: __his will be the night I escape!

I am going to be murdered.It wasn__ any easier to face in the daytime.