Utter Destruction (Marcus M., Grade 5

I knew it would be a fastball right down the middle or ten feet over my head. Jaws was wild and we’d been walking off of her all night. The ball came and I got my bat around. I hit it right on the barrel. The way I liked to. It hit the ground and skipped into the outfield. Before I knew it, I was standing on first, grinning ear to ear. I had gotten a hit off Jaws. It was 3-3. Tie ballgame. We just needed one more run, and then we would beat the Firebyrds for the first time. We went down quietly after my hit, but I managed to hold them on defense. Still, we had to score another run. Allysa Espinoza came up to the plate. She swung and hit nothing but air. Strike 1. On the next pitch, she threw her bat out at the ball. And she made contact. Amelia who had been on third bolted for home and crossed standing up. I’ll never forget that moment. We all went out and were jumping up and down. All my friends in one place winning a championship. Beating a team we wanted to beat for a long time. All together. We were just good friends playing the game we loved and playing it pretty well. We got our first-place rings. They were pink and read CHAMPIONS this time. The sweet taste of victory. After saying my goodbyes, I walked out with my parents on the paved dirt road. We were leaving behind the red ants and yellow jackets, but we were taking the memories with us. The memories of Acton. The memories of the Firebyrds. The memory of the Fury I loved. The memory of the game of a lifetime.

Utter Destruction By Marcus M., Grade 5

Ainsley with her championship ring!

Frustration is when something doesn’t work, like when you’ve tried 100 times to get a pencil to balance on your finger and it doesn’t. It’s the feeling you get when something seems impossible. It is the taste of tough bread, plain with no flavor. It feels like the world is against you, and you can’t do anything about it. It is when you're so angry because you can’t get something done, and you’ve tried so hard to do it. It’s when your face is boiling red, just because you can’t get something done. And now, it is my brother jumping up and down on the couch, and watching, helpless as he trips. And knowing I cannot stop what is about to happen.

Five years before this moment, my grandma got me a wonderful present for my birthday, or christmas, or something. The London Bridge(or Tower Bridge) was a lego set with four thousand pieces and it was meant for only sixteen year old’s and older. I was only five years old at the time and I just watched in glory as a huge box arrived in the mail. I didn’t open until about a week later, when I found out that the plastic bags were not numbered. This meant that I had to dump out all the pieces and search for each one as I built. I sort of quit on it after the first 10 pages of the instruction manual because it was too hard. It stayed on the ground until my dad helped me put everything in plastic bags so it wouldn’t cover my brother’s