Highly Commended Story - The Calling Storm

“The Calling Storm” by Karthik P.R, St. Patrick's Academy, Bengaluru, India, is the Highly Commended story in the junior category of the first biannual Short Story Contest 2019.

Karthik P.R. is a grade 7 student studying at St.Patrick's Academy, Bangalore. He creates cartoon based story series in his free time. He likes listening to Pop and Electronic rock music. Karthik’s ambition is to become a video game designer.

The Calling Storm

It was late in the night. It was very disturbing to see trees felled by ghastly winds, rains destroying crops of peasants, cars crashing, buildings collapsing, people left homeless and the bad weather turning the green city to black, all in one night.

The visuals from the TV were indeed disturbing. All news channels warned that the cyclone is fast approaching my town as well.

After watching TV, I thought “will it really happen to my town?”

I didn’t believe in these predictions and I hoped that it won’t happen to my beautiful little town.

I went to Michael’s house, my friend for more than 10 years. Mike never cared much about future and loved enjoying every moment of life. The fact that his parents left him a lot of money made him all too lazy.

I discussed the report from the news channel with Mike and asked for his opinion.

Mike in his usual witty tone said, “Hey mate, don’t bother. You can stay in my house if you are really worried. My house is all too strong”

I totally forgot about my part time job with cream café. I took leave from Mike and rushed to the café.

My friend Robert also worked in the same café. Robert always used to come late to work.

But to my surprise, he was early to work that day. I asked him “What’s special today? Everything alright with you, hmm”

Robert said “Nothing special, Edward. I got up early and had nothing else to do”

I continued making fun of his statements and I totally forgot about the disturbing news, which kept bothering me from the previous night. I felt much better and relaxed.

When Mr. Nick Jason, the café owner asked us why the shop had less customers that day, it immediately took me back to the news channel report.

Suddenly, the sky turned dark, weirdly dark, a loud thunder was heard and everyone started running. What immediately followed was frightening. Heavy winds, lightning and buildings collapsing with loud noise.

Nick immediately asked all the staff from café to leave and reach safer places. When we went to the car parking, Robert’s car was burnt. So, I called my friend, Cruz, to pick us up by the high way.

Cruz was on her way out of the town and she promptly picked us up on the way. She speeded up her car, up on the highway, down in the down town and straight to the safest neighborhood.

Robert told me how storms destroyed the towns and cities. All of us stayed at Cruz’s grandparent’s house that night.

I woke up very late on the next day and quickly checked on the TV news. There were plenty of damage to the town and the news channel focused more on how government could have acted better.

I went to my house that afternoon and saw a few damages. I thought to myself not everything told by the news channel was true. There were damages, but the people of my town were doing their best to get back to normalcy.

There were plenty of volunteers from the neighborhood helping the police and fire personnel. I immediately joined the volunteers to do my bit. I came to know from a fellow volunteer about a fire in the orphanage that broke late in the night. There were hundreds of orphans. But, they all had moved out earlier in the evening because of the storm.

Hundreds of orphans, teachers and volunteers were saved. People always had lot of bad things to say about storms. But this storm for a change saved hundreds of people.

From that day onwards, people of Centralberg called it the CALLING STORM, although it had no direct connection to what happened.