(2022) YEAR 11 STANDARD TASK 1:

PART A: CREATIVE WRITING PIECE – (12/12)

The orange pill bottle stared Eden down menacingly.

Stepping into the crisp kitchen this morning, she didn’t expect to end up in this situation. Eden
wanted nothing more than to just grab an apple, say goodbye to her dad and walk out the door.
Instead, here she was not being able to pull her eyes away from that damn orange pill bottle.

The kitchen wasn’t welcoming anymore. The timber floorboards were stained; the once warm-toned
marble countertops had lost their shine and become dull; nothing was the same anymore. Some say
that the kitchen is the heart and soul of the house. To Eden, all it felt like now was a cold, savage
wasteland that was barely a shell of its old self.

Eden’s dad was still upstairs. He didn’t leave his room much anymore, not that Eden could blame
him. Most days she could barely get herself to move. Yet, she was convinced that her father was
slowly driving himself to insanity. Staring at the same four walls every day in a crumbling depressive
state of mind was enough to push anyone over the edge, Eden genuinely had no idea how he could
do that to himself every day of his depressing, miserable life.

The family of three – well, back when there were three – could barely cope when Eden’s mother
walked out. Her father turned to isolate himself, whereas his two daughters turned to drugs to help
mellow out the overhearing, painful void they found themselves eternally stuck in.

When Eden’s older sister, Sage, decided that she couldn’t take the pain anymore, she overdosed. On
Oxycontin to be exact. Eden vividly remembered bounding happily into her sister’s continuously
cluttered room to ask Sage is she could borrow her sparkly silver dress for the party she was going to,
yet she never got the chance to ask. The image of Sage sprawled out on the ground, unmoving, was
something that Eden would never be able to erase from her mind. Some days she felt like her throat
was still raw from the scream she had let out at the sight.

When the paramedics couldn’t save Sage’s life, all of Eden’s healthy coping mechanisms went out the
window. She didn’t want to leave her grieving father, but on the other hand she couldn’t keep going
on without her sister . . . without her anchor in the cruel reality that life was. Her father watched on
helplessly as she resorted back to the comforting lull of stealing his Oxycontins once again.

Just so she could feel nothing but the numbing sensation that spread throughout her entire body.

But now? Eden was five months clean and steered clear of any form of drug. Until this morning in the
dimly lit kitchen.

Gripping the countertop until her knuckles went white, Eden found herself struggling to breathe.
Oxygen seemed impossible to reach. Encompassed in a sudden state of pure panic, Eden could only
wish that her dad would come down from his prison of a bedroom to take away the pills in front of
her.

Why had he left them out? He knew the risks of his daughter being around them. Did he give up on
his parental duties just like her mother had?

Eden’s thoughts wandered. It let like she was stuck at a crossroads in the middle of the dark, dense
forest that was her mind. Was the left path the correct one? Or was it the right?
The kitchen surroundings seemed to melt away as Eden slipped further and deeper into her
damaged mind. Glancing quickly towards the stairs to make sure her father was nowhere in sight;
Eden took a deep breath. Her fingers started to twitch, needing something to satiate the sudden
agitation that crawled under her skin like hungry ants. An impulse to scream built up in her throat
and tears of frustration threatened to spill.

Whoever said the right path was always right was nothing but wrong. In Eden’s imagination, that
pathway was the devil on her shoulder. A future full of going to parties and getting high on whatever
drugs she could find just to take away the pain of all the people she had lost. A future full of failing
classes and shameful grades. Or maybe she just wouldn’t have a future at all.

It’s not like she had to worry about affecting anyone if she did go through with that risky lifestyle of a
pathway. Her father didn’t leave his room as it was, and he barely had a reaction when his own
daughter passed.

The left pathway was picturesque. It was the happy ending that everyone wished to see in fairytales.
The angel on her other shoulder. It was the future of good grades and getting her eventual dream
job. A future full of willingly healing from all the childhood trauma that her brain was riddled with in
healthy ways. The pathway that would lead Eden to settling down and starting a family with the
pretty girl with ruby red hair from her art class.

There was once a time when Eden had promised her father that she would never become like Sage.
Sage was the embodiment of the right pathway, and Eden had always been the left. Distracting
herself with schoolwork and studying had helped her cope with her mother walking out. But now
that her older sister was gone, she had to suppress the urge to follow in Sage’s footsteps as a way to
cope with things that the average seventeen-year-old should not have to deal with.

Her dark eyes flickered between the orange pill bottle and the arched front door once, twice, thrice.
With a sigh of disappointment towards nothing but her own stupidity in decision making, Eden
swiftly snatched the bright orange bottle off the dirty countertop and rushed out of the broken
home.

Eden’s life was over before it had even begun.

REFLECTION – (7/8)

In the imaginative writing piece I created, I aimed to explore themes from ‘What I Learned as a Kid in
Jail’ by Ismael Nazario and ‘The Flowers’ by Alice Walker to influence the creation of my original
story. From reading ‘The Flowers’, I was influenced by the sentence structure that it contained. The
short story ends with a five-word sentence, which is something that influenced my own story.
“Eden’s life was over before it even begun” was the short and to the point sentence that I used to
end my story. I chose this aspect to represent the slight tension of the main character’s thoughts.
After reading the transcript for ‘What I Learned as a Kid in Jail’, I was inspired by the use of rhetorical
questions, which definitely influenced my own writing. “Was the left path the correct one?” is an
example of a rhetorical question that Eden, the main character, had asked herself, even though it was
from the third person POV. I chose this to represent the uncertainty of Eden’s actions. I chose image
three as the key theme for my creative writing because it gave me the option to symbolise two
options that Eden could choose from in the form of pathways. “It felt like she was stuck at a
crossroads” was what I wrote, referencing image three instead of her being at a literal fork in the
path. I believe that reading the two specific texts I listed influenced my writing since it gave me
effective techniques that would make the imaginative writing piece I created a lot more interesting
for the reader. I also believe that integrating image three into my story painted a brighter picture for
the reader since it gave a visual for the two options that Eden has to decide from.