Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 12 | Page 549

From Present to Past
Yew Chung International School, Cai, Maggie – 10
T
hat day, I didn’t know anything would happen to me, but deep, deep down in the ground as I was minding
my own business, it struck…
Hi , I’m Max , just an ordinary man who lives in Shanghai. I own a business, have a car, have a wife and
children, have a house . . . . . . But something extraordinary happened one day and it changed my life (literally). It
all happened on that one day…
While I was walking down the streets of Shanghai, taking the same old route I take to get to work, I heard a
loud cracking sound. It seemed that it was getting close to me but just as I was about to take my next step,
“SWOOSH” A large crack formed only 1 cm away from my foot. I turned around to see a bright red light struck
across the sky. It seemed like all that what had happened was invisible to everyone else for everyone kept their
heads down staring at the screens, acting like nothing had happened.
After 5 seconds, the tiny crack turned into a gigantic hole, and still, nobody noticed it. It was like everything
in the world was turning against me.
While I was trying really hard not to stare down the black hole, I felt a force pushing me down the hole and
I couldn’t fight against it. I lost control, tripped and fell down, down, down the hole . . . . . .
Was I dead? Was I in heaven ? What had happened to me? Where was I? So many thoughts occupied my
brain.
I woke up, and found myself laying in an old, broken bed inside a rusty house.
This was all so confusing.
I found a man in front of me.
“ Oh you're awake, and try not to touch your scar , it’s quite bad” he told me. I turned my head around and
found a huge scar right across my arm. I touched it and let out a tiny scream “ouch”.
My eyes were still blurry, and I couldn’t recognize where I was.
“Where am I? How did I get here?”
“What, you’re asking me? well, I found you lying across the ground under a huge pit”
“A huge pit?” I was really confused.
“yeah so many people are falling down that pit nowadays , I guess they were just not careful enough, I always
wonder where the people who fell down came from”
“Wow” I looked around the room, it was really, really old, broken and rusty, almost as it was old Shanghai, then
something struck me what if this was old Shanghai!
“excuse me , um… which year is it ?” I felt embarrassed asking that question.
“Now I think that….. that fall of the pit made you lose your memory! It’s 1936 dummy! 1936 in SHANGHAI!”
“ damn ! I knew I was right !”
“Excuse me ?!”
“ oh nothing sorry”
I quickly made my way to the door, wanting to see what the world had looked like in the 90’s.
Everything was so different, so different it was hard for me to get used to.
I used to be able to see tall buildings and skyscrapers but now there were wooden short houses. There were no cars,
but instead people dragging you around in a wooden chair (sort of), No electricity, how on earth would you
contact people, cook ….. And calculators, I don’t see any calculators, only tiny wooden balls on a wooden rack ,
you call those calculators? Also…… I knew living in the past was hard, but I didn’t expect it to be this hard!
I thought to myself while standing by the door.
“What are you doing there?” The man shouted at me, I must have been lost in my thoughts.