Winter Break

Ask any student and they’ll tell you that their favourite time of the year is when winter sets in, snow falls heavily from the sky and it’s finally time for winter break. A time to relax and enjoy the snow like nature intended, a time to play outside with your friends until you feel frozen and have to go back inside to sit by the fire so as to thaw yourself out. Everyone loves the holidays, Risa is no exception. But all good things must end and it reaches that point when the world restarts itself and kick starts everyone’s mind until they realise that snow was never meant to last forever.
Eventually there comes the dreadful day when school starts again and the youth of this world are forced to endure more knowledge being shoved down their throats.
Monday approached too fast for Risa’s liking and she was dragged from her dreams of leaving school by the warm morning rays hitting her exposed back and the shrill ring of the alarm clock beside her head.


“Five more minutes,” she uttered, her voice soft like the sound of a spring wind, as she rolled over a little more than she meant to and was sent tumbling to the floor. Her eyes shot open and she cried out in pain before rubbing her head.
She grumbled as she slowly picked herself up from the floor, dragging her duvet with her, and made her way down the stairs and into the kitchen where her father was sat at the table reading the morning newspaper and chomping on a slice of toast and jam. Her mother was stood at the sink, washing the dishes and humming along to whatever song was playing from the radio. Risa smiled, a perfectly average and normal family that she could be proud of on this perfectly normal, if not glared upon, day. The dark haired teenager took a seat at the table with her father and took a slice of toast from the plate in front of her and began munching through it. She briefly heard her father ‘tsk’ her for eating it dry, leading her to take another piece and smirk as her father rolled his eyes and went back to reading yesterday’s sports results.
Risa could stall as much as she wanted and pretend today was just another care free day, but reality would always find its way through her games and it came to that time when her mother started pushing her upstairs to get dressed, lest she be late for her first day back. Of course it did not take long for Risa to get ready, she’d had the perfect ‘back-to-school’ outfit planned since the day winter break started. It said ‘I’m bold, creative, sassy and you wish you could rock stripy socks like this.’, just the way Risa liked it.


The walk to school, which she always had to do alone on account of her living the furthest away from school and none of her friends living remotely near by, was abnormally quiet. It was not unusual for the streets to be empty of school kids or busy mothers with pushchairs and crying babies. But the roads were usually host to a couple of cars driven by business men on their long commute to the office and the paths usually held old women with their tiny, yappy dogs that lunged for your ankles as you passed. But as Risa strolled up the street, her dark hair flying behind her with the wind as she hunched over to protect her face from the bitter cold, there was not a single person in sight. The curtains were all drawn across the windows of the houses she passed and the cars all sat perfectly in the centre of immaculate drive ways. There were no stray cats trying to rip holes in bags of rubbish in the hope of getting their paws on left over food that some wasteful human threw out. Even the mail man wasn’t on the streets, whistling his happy tune as he hastily shoved letters through letterboxes, meaning they were bent and folded by the time they got into the house. It struck Risa as odd that the streets were so empty and eerily quiet, none the less she continued her walk to school, eyes pealed for a passing person, even a bird in the sky would ease her mind at this point.


Arriving at school, after twenty minutes of awkward silence filled walking, her mind reeled again as she found the entire field and concrete area empty. Her first thought was that she took longer on her walk than normal and all the students had already been shooed off to class by angry, tired teachers but a quick glance at her watch told her that she was in fact ten minutes early. Her eyes wandered around hoping to catch a glimpse of a girls hair from behind a bush, she waited for the time people would jump out and say ‘boo’. Suddenly the bell rang, making Risa jump out of her skin, signalling that the start of school was in five minutes. She wandered into the main building, through the corridors, vacant of students and teachers alike, until she reached her classroom that was, like the rest of the school, completely empty. She sat down at the back of the room like she usually did and waited for someone to turn up, she refused to believe that everyone was skipping class and it wasn’t possible that school didn’t start again until tomorrow, she’d made a point of ringing the school the previous evening and asking about the possibility of the school not re-opening until the Tuesday. But the lady on the phone had said that school was definitely opening on Monday and that she expected her to be there bright and early. ‘Maybe she should have taken her own advice’ Risa thought as she stared at the clock. At exactly 8:45 the door suddenly opened and in poured 25 students. Risa sighed in relief as she looked eagerly towards the crowd in the hope of picking out the faces of her friends. It wasn’t until she couldn’t find them, a feat that is never hard to do with the way they choose to dress, that she began to realise that the group of people walking into class and finding their seats all had exactly the same hair colour, then she noticed that they all had the same hair style. She noticed that they all wore neat and crease free uniforms made up of pleated, black, knee length skirts, a simple white blouse, black cotton tights, an ill fitted black cardigan and shapeless leather shoes. She noticed that they all swung their arms in sync and walked in sync and pulled their chairs back, before sinking down in them, together. They were like an army of clones not yet briefed on the ins and outs of human behaviour.


As the day continued, Risa became more and more anxious and worried. At lunch she had been met with the entire student body taking identical sized bites of perfectly cut sandwich at the same time and bringing a carton of juice to their lips soon after. In art, Risa discovered that even the coolest teachers had made these drastic changes, Mr Blackwell was the school heart throb, for lack of a better word, he was the youngest teacher at the mere age of 25 and had that sort of timeless beauty and an aura of charm. In a girl’s school, it was not surprising that everyone, without fail, loved him. But as Risa entered art, she found that he had become emotionless, not even glancing her way as she entered, he’d swept his unruly blonde hair into a comb over that was stuck to his head like glue and his casual white shirt had been replaced with a dress shirt and suit jacket. She left school before it had officially ended and decided to walk back home where she knew her normal family were waiting. She braved the deathly silent streets and harsh winds again until she finally reached her house. Her eyes widened as she saw that the curtains were swept across the windows and their car was parked perfectly in the centre of the drive. She walked numbly through the house until she found her parents sitting silently on the couch watching the gardening channel on television and not paying any mind to the fact that their daughter had skipped the end of school.


As Risa turned to leave, intent on getting out of this place, she noticed small flashing micro-chip in her mother’s wrist and her mind sent her down memory lane where she recalled seeing the same thing in the student’s and teacher’s wrists as well. The first thought that popped into her head was alien invasion, these people around her were not people at all, they were in fact other life forces trying to take over the world. However she soon realised that such a theory sounded silly and she dismissed it. She remembered her thoughts on the students at school, ‘clones’ she’d said, they were like clones that did not quite know how to behave properly. She rushed upstairs and sat down on her bed where she continued to muse about what was happening and why she wasn’t affected by what was going on. The sky outside continuingly darkened until Risa could not see her hand even when it was right in front of her face. It was an unnatural type of darkness that came with an unnatural type of silence. There were no sounds of nocturnal animals waking themselves up, neither were there the sounds of her parents fidgeting in bed. This led her to ask the question, ‘Do these things even sleep’. She could not give herself an answer as she slid under the sheets into the warm cocoon of her blankets.
“Tomorrow will be a different day,” She said to herself sleepily before letting her eyes close.

The alarm clock on the bedside cabinet began to ring and Risa sat up in bed, as she reached over to turn it off a flashing could be seen on her wrist briefly, she mechanically cocked her head to the side and stared at the small device before she returned her stiff limb to the confines of her duvet.
Risa trembled inside the metal confines of her own mind as she felt herself begin to numb, darkness seeping through the corners of her vision, she desperately to claw her way out of this steel cage she was imprisoned in, but still the flashing continued.