Young Writers Project is an independent nonprofit that engages Vermont and New Hampshire students to write, helps them improve and connects them with authentic audiences in newspapers, before live audiences and on websites, including youngwritersproject.org, vtdigger.org, vpr.net and cowbird.com. Young Writers Project also publishes a monthly digital magazine, The Voice. YWP is supported by this newspaper and foundations, businesses and individuals who recognize the power and value of writing.
Prompt: Write about your best April Fool’s Day prank.
The day before April Fool’s, I got off the bus and walked up my driveway with my brother Jackson, as usual. Then we checked to see if our chickens had laid any eggs.
But when I was done with my snack and homework, I ran upstairs, looked in the medicine cabinet and found the baby powder. I put some in my mom’s hair dryer.
Jackson asked what I was doing up there. I told him the complete truth, but I had to use blackmail so he wouldn’t tell my mom.
When she used the hair dryer, she screamed, “CAMDONNNNNN!” She didn’t have to think about who had done it. She knew.
Prompt: General writing
On the morning of my little brother’s seventh birthday, I woke him before dawn, coaxed him from his bed, and took him out back to the woods to go flying rabbit hunting. I dressed him in soft black clothes. He looked like a particularly small ninja. I even let him wear my leather moccasins that I had bought at the gift shop last year. I told him to be quiet. And sure enough, he was quiet. I handed him a burlap sack to catch the flying rabbits in. Everyone knows that’s how you catch them, after all.
I pushed open the screen door. The air outside smelled like mud and moon and mystery, and I smiled at his goofy, little face as he sucked it all into his lungs. And we went into the woods to catch a flying rabbit.
“There.” I pointed at a knot of grass by the base of an ancient oak.
“I see it!”
I put a hand gently over his mouth. “Quiet. It’ll hear us.”
We crept up to the knot of grass, he grinning all the way, and threw the burlap sack over it. I pinched the top closed tightly so it couldn’t escape. I handed him the sack. He took it eagerly in his red mitten and held it up to his face.
“We caught one!” he said breathlessly.
I held back a laugh at his silly, silly face.
“We sure did!”
Inside the bag, something bulged out a little. Then it moved, straining against the burlap’s tight weave. My little brother dropped the bag, and from the fraying top burst a feathery white wing. Then another. Then a little cotton ball of a tail went soaring past the moon. And the bag was empty.
And a rabbit feather, soft and downy white, lay nestled on the ground.
