**Wrote this as a challenge from a girl in my English class…she challenged me to write a short story, size 12 font, that was only a page.  Pretty difficult, but I can never resist a challenge.  Here’s the result, and I must say, I’m pretty pleased.**

**Well enjoy!**

**Kree**

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Ring around the rosy…

            It was revolting the way the disease had deformed the appearance of many, many people everywhere I went…England’s streets were sickening to walk upon for various reasons...but the people…oh the people…were they even human anymore?  With their face so reddened and sickly, they were more like walking carcasses with the remains of blood blotched across their bodies.  Some of them even had the audacity and foolishness to walk outside when the scarlet rashes blackened into an even more nauseating color.  I could not understand how people so incredibly sick could walk out among other people.  The disease was certainly contagious, as it spread through the town faster than the rats that carried it.  I found myself unable to walk the streets anymore, appalled by such a weakness caused by the scene…the scene of death’s rampage.

A pocket full of posy…

            The stench of rotting bodies left unburied in the void buildings was even more grimacing than the sight of them.  Perhaps that was more of the reason why I could not bring myself to search for fresh air…there was none.  The only other odor was that of the ridiculous herbs in my pocket.  Their scent chokes me rather than relieve me of the decaying flesh, but I suppose it is better than the aroma of death.  Mamma said that these herbs would protect me from the evil spirits carrying the sickness.  Mamma never believed in such nonsense until more and more people started dying.  Perhaps there is another plague of insanity…a plague of fear that is killing people as well as the other one. 

Ashes, ashes…

            The stench grows worse with each passing day…the people in town are quickly leaving until there are only a few families left in the vicinity.  A wagon comes to collect the bodies left behind in the empty houses and there is a bonfire in the middle of the road that night.  So many bodies…so much death…so much ashes sprinting from side to side…some of it even finds its way through the doors and windows of our house.  Mamma finally persuades Poppa to flee the grasp of death, but it is much too late…he has grasped us long before our knowledge.  Slowly…I drift away…drift away with the ashes…

We all fall down.

            I walk the streets of my town again as a recurring shadow.  Small children grasp each other’s hands in a moment of laughter, a moment of bliss.  Their smiles are foolish and unknowledgeable as they sing and chant of a memory that was once the life of fatality.  “Ring around the rosy…” they say, “a pocket full of posy…” Silly children, I smile to myself.  They know nothing of the real terrors and horrors of the past of the graves…

I walk the streets of England once again.