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Rough Draft Short Story

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The summer I turned twelve, my mother decided to fulfill her lifelong dream of building a horse stable in our backyard. In order do this, she enlisted the help my dedicated father, who spent four long weeks building a perfectly adequate one.. He was outside from dawn until dusk every day, hammering nails into pieces of ash brown wood and structuring them into what looked like a small house.

Whenever my father would take a well-deserved break from his countless hours of labour to come inside for a meal, pieces of his thinning blonde hair would be stuck to his forehead and his shirt would be completely damp with sweat. My mother and I would simultaneously scrunch our noses in disgust from this smell, although we knew it meant that he was working …show more content…

I disliked having to wait. As soon as the final nail was hammered in, my mother took me to the closest ranch, which was 45 minutes away, in order to purchase a horse. It was a rather old place surrounded by overgrown grass and wobbly white fencing, but lovely nonetheless. My mother talked to the owner as I marvelled over the beautiful horses grazing in the lush, green fields. Their names were engraved in a metal slate on each of their hooves. I ended up deciding on a chestnut thoroughbred named Dugan. I chose him because his black tail was the only one that fell freely out of all of the horses. The rest had theirs folded into smooth braids or intricate twists.

Once we brought Dugan home, I quickly discovered my ardour for horseback riding. Every morning, I would groggily roll out of bed at five o’clock, just as the beginnings of a sunrise hid between cracks of the tall pine trees on the property, and ride him until my mother summoned me inside for breakfast. Before long, I began entering riding competitions at the local fair, from which I received many bright purple participation ribbons that I proudly displayed on the otherwise empty wall space in my dull …show more content…

He would sneeze so many times in a row until that his emerald green eyes would well up with tears. Every morning, there was a mountain of white tissues that up took up nearly half of the space on his bedside table. This was unfortunate situation for my mother, as she would be kept up all night from my father’s constant nose blowing. Sometimes, it troubled her so much; that she would resort to squeezing in my tiny, twin sized bed with me.

This wasn’t a bother as we had shared a bed when we visited my grandparents in early August. My dad had gone on away on an important business trip, so my mother had decided to go back to her hometown for a week or two. Her parents lived in Prince Edward Island and their house was a five-minute walk to the beach. I never joined my mum when she went. I didn’t like it there. Although it had beautiful red sand, it was always tremendously busy and made me feel claustrophobic. Thing that attracted tourists to it was a ten-story lighthouse built in the fifteenth century that was still in functioning

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