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Something I wrote for English...
Small, bare feet pattered an irregular rhythm on gray mountain rock, hopping over patches of dried-out yellow grass. Flashes of a cheery red showed through the bushes as a short, strawberry blond girl skipped from one rock to another. “C’mon!” the little girl whined, tugging a massive brown teddy bear out of a bush. “No fair! You got a head start!”
“Nah, I’m just faster than you!” Her brother swung his copper mane out of his clear gray eyes, tilting his chin disdainfully. He stuck out his tongue. “Sibyl’s slo-ow! Sibyl’s slo-ow!” he chanted.
“Wait up!” Sibyl wavered on top of a tall rock, swinging her teddy bear to stay balanced. “I think I stubbed my toe!” she whined. “Wait up for me, Danny!”
“You’re a big baby!”
Sibyl tried her best to follow until her bear got tangled in another shrub. “C’mon Mister Bear, we wanna catch Danny!” She tugged him free and patted its woolen head happily. “Danny? Where’d you go?” She giggled when he didn’t answer. “Are you hiding from me? Come on out then!” Sibyl tugged a reddish-blond pigtail. “Is this a game?”
She bounced from rock to rock, looking under shadowy bushes and behind trees nearly black with ivy. The pale gray eyes she shared with her brother grew stormy and her lower lip stuck out. “Where ARE you? It’s not fair, why’re you hiding? C’mon out!” she whimpered pitifully. “I wanna go home!” She turned to the bear in her hands, holding its black button nose up to hers. “Mister Bear, did you see where Danny went?” Sibyl bit her lip, still pouting. “Did you see him?” She searched for a flat spot on the rock, and swung the bear in circles over her head. “Find Danny, Mister Bear!” Sibyl let go of her teddy, and it flew off to her left.
“You think he went that way? Okay!” She flounced off to pick up her friend, her scarlet jumper bobbing like a jellyfish. The skirt swung to a stop as the girl picked up her bear. Sibyl took two more steps before stopping again—the yawning mouth of a shadow-filled cavern opened up a scant few inches from where she stood. She bent down on hands and knees, grass stains smearing her skirt as she crawled. A high-pitched scream rang through the quiet forest air, startling a lone crow into flight. Sibyl clapped a hand over her mouth. “Danny?”
Her older brother lay in a haphazard position on the floor of the cave. The rocks around his head looked wet. “Danny!” she screamed, pounding the loamy earth with her fists. “Danny! Get up! Please get up! Danny!” Warm, salty tears poured down her cheeks. The sudden boom of thunder only made her wail louder. “I’m scared of the thunder, Danny! Please get up! I wanna go home!” She looked upwards to watch the gray clouds the two of them had been running under minutes before turn black and writhe like demons turning somersaults. Rain started streaming from the sky, and Sibyl looked back at her brother. “Danny,” she pleaded, her tears falling with the rain onto her brother’s face. “Danny! I’m gonna get Uncle Bill! He’s got a ladder!”
Sibyl tore home, leaving her bear behind, running as fast as her feet could take her. The wet rock made her slip often, and she’d fall on her stomach, scraping her fingers and coating her pretty crimson jumper with mud so it turned a red so dark it was almost black. She kept wailing even as she reached the porch of her aunt and uncle’s house, screaming as she beat at the door until her uncle answered.
Before her uncle could exclaim about how wet she was, Sibyl screamed into his face, “It’s Danny! Danny! Mister Bear found Danny and he fell! He fell!” Her uncle yelled for his wife before running out to get his ladder from the shed out back. “Anne, grab Sibyl- something’s happened to Daniel!”
“What happened, baby?” Anne asked her niece—Sibyl didn’t let her finish. “Danny FELL!” A stricken look came over the woman’s face as Sibyl punched her and wriggled out of her grip. “Let me go!” The girl tore herself away from her aunt and back out the door. “Uncle Bill, Uncle Bill!”
Her uncle came around the house with a wooden ladder in his hands, and Sibyl ran through the woods with both uncle and aunt following close behind. She led them to the cave in the forest floor, shrieking at Danny. “Uncle Bill’s here! C’mon Danny, wake up!” Her uncle slid down the ladder to reach the boy, and when his wife found the cave with Sibyl standing over the opening crying and her husband coming up the ladder with her nephew cocooned in a blanket, she screamed along with the girl.
Sibyl was grabbed by the wrist and brought back to the house where her uncle immediately called the hospital while her aunt called her parents. She was left to stare at the cocoon of blankets. “Your face is covered.” Thin shoulders shook in a midnight red jumper, and the little girl, legs and arms streaked with mud, lovely strawberry-blond hair a muddy brown and half of it pulled out of a pigtail, and her pale gray eyes turning cold, started keening like a bird in mourning.