Hidden Paradise by Alyssa McIntosh

by Alyssa McIntosh
(Westlans MI USA)

I put myself in a novel. It takes place from last year when I was eighteen and everyone is signing up for a church admiration. And I was left alone in our church this morning and picked up by two taxi drivers who take me to the airport, and I was left in an airplane full of kids my age and they told me I was going to a spooky cathedral which belongs to Pastor Peter Smith and they said he's mean. And I'm picked up by an old woman who was sent by him. She tells me about a cathedral in the edge of the forest that has 800 rooms and 90 gardens and 70 courtyards and that Pastor Smith a strange man because he grieves for his wife's death. I meet a young volunteer named Maria and she becomes friendly and tells me about her 14 year old sister Shannon and I got outside and she tells me about a hidden place that's shut up and no one's been into for twelve years.

I meet an old church gardener named Barry Williams and make friends with a pigeon. And I excercise in cold weather and get healthily hungry and Maria told me that the hidden place belonged to Mrs. Smith and it use to be Paradised and there was a diseseased tree with diseased fruit and she ate it and got ill and she died the next day. I hear a sound of crying, and I wander in the forbidden rooms and find the key in an old shed and I find the gate hidden beneath the vines and it looked like a dead place. Shannon the 14 year old girl who can tame animals brought me a packet of flower seeds and gardening tools and I asked her if she knew about secrets and I tell her about the hidden place and I show it to her. It was just a place that needed taken care of.

I meet Pastor Smith and ask him for some earth then after that in the middle of the night, I meet his bedridden sickly 12 year old crippled daughter who couldn't bear to be stared at and thinks she is doomed to have diseases on her legs and not reach adulthood. Me and Shannon think of taking her to the hidden place. Sara throws fits when I don't come and see her then I know I have to get even with her because she's a spoiled girl. I told her I didn't see any diseases on her legs. Sara promised she would go outside. We take her outside to see the hidden Paradise. Sara gets her health and starts walking. And becomes a normal twelve year old girl not some sick girl in bed everyday. It was a happy ending when her father Pastor Smith was the first one to see it.