Extract A
‘Be careful with Mama’s bow.’ Renee took her eyes off the road for a moment. It was an expensive bow, and usually she wouldn’t let Melody touch it. Especially at home, where Melody often ran around the house with her own, much cheaper, beginner’s bow, pretending she was conducting an orchestra made up of dining chairs and teddy bears and the clotheshorse. Renee had lost count of the number of training bows Melody had broken.
But tonight, after Renee had just performed as the most recent addition to the widely acclaimed Five Bows Quintet, Renee couldn’t bear to tell her off. Melody’s voice rose again. ‘Got a moose, got a moose, will you do the fan dance-o.’ Perhaps she might be a singer one day, Renee thought.
Melody launched into the thunderbolts and lightning part of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
‘Pianissimo,’ Renee whispered, but Melody simply grinned and sang even louder.
As Renee turned her head to look at her daughter, a flash flew past the corner of her eye. She looked up into the rear-view mirror, her hands turning the wheel ever so slightly.
A clatter. A crack.
A scream. Melody unclipped her seatbelt and clambered along the back seat.
‘Sorry!’ she cried out, picking up the broken bow.
‘What did you do? Get back into your seat!’ Renee yelled louder than she’d meant to.
‘I’m sorry, Mama.’ Melody started to cry. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ Her cries became wails.
‘Hush, now. It’s okay.’ Renee righted her steering, her eyes darting from the road to the mirror.
‘I’m sorry, Mama.’ Melody sobbed and the despair in her voice made Renee turn around again.
‘It’s okay . . .’
‘Mama!’ Melody screamed and pointed. ‘Truck.’
Renee snapped around but it was too late. The truck had clipped them and they spun, the car flipping onto its roof, Melody sailing across the back seat, Renee lurching forward, stretching out her arm to catch her baby girl.
‘No!’ Renee screamed, the crunch, shatter, screech filling her ears before the world went dark.
Extract B
The day she turned eleven was the day Zadie Ma discovered her superpower. She was eating breakfast when Mama started to shout.
Zadie looked up to see who Mama was talking to. A thin line of ants was heading for some globs of honey that had dripped onto the bench.
Mama went to wipe it up, but they still kept coming so she got down on her hands and knees, buried her head in the cupboard under the kitchen sink and emerged with the insect sprayer. It was the weapon of death to any bug.
Zadie hated killing even an ant, so she shouted, ‘No, Mama, wait!’
Just then the bell out in the shop tinkled. Mama dropped the bug sprayer on the table, wiped her hands on her apron and went down the hall into the milk bar.
This was Zadie’s only chance to save the ants. She tried turning them away by putting her finger in their path. They went around it. Then Teddy had a go by drawing a line with his saliva. That didn’t stop them either. Next, Zadie tore off the corner of her homework book and tried herding them back. No matter what they tried, the smell of honey was just too alluring.
In the end, Zadie had to leave the ants to their fate. She didn’t want to see the massacre so she went upstairs to her bedroom and began to write a story in her writing book called Little Ant, Cassandra. It was about the smallest but wisest ant in the nest and how nobody ever listened to her.
An hour later, when Zadie went back down to the kitchen, the air didn’t have the chemical smell of insect spray.
‘What happened to the ants?’ she asked Teddy, who was sitting at the kitchen table drawing the human body with its organs in all the wrong places.
‘They wented away. Disvapowated,’ he said without looking up.
‘What do you mean?’
He shrugged. ‘They went phut then no more anties.’
‘So Mama didn’t try to kill them?’
‘Nope.’
Zadie didn’t know it then but something miraculous had happened. It was not until she wrote another story called Little Kit that she realised some of the stories she made up would come true.