INTRODUCTION
This piece of writing is from early 98, when I was in year ten. Our first assessment task for the year, we had to base a short piece of creative writing around a starting paragraph. The paragraph we got was crap, and I never re-wrote it, but it basically had something to do with a bunch of people (not necessarily people, either) standing around waiting for some sort of test to begin. Anyway, this was my little continuation of it. For the record, I got full marks ^_^
 - Fox Lee (http://foxlee.arts-eclectic.com)


THE TEST
She was among them, standing as tall, but shrinking in their shadows. Her hands were trembling at her sides, but she refused to let her body betray what terrible fears she concealed. She knew she was alone here, lost in that rigid sea of men with no faces, no names. They did not see her, their eyes fixed forward and their thin lips set in grim silence.
	She knew what they were thinking. They were afraid, petrified, so scared she could almost taste their fear on the rising wind. They were boys, lost in a world of men, afraid even to make a move lest they should lose their footing and plunge into that dark abyss that loomed on the edge of their minds.
	Boys. And what did that make her? Lower than them even in the narrowed eyes of their stone-cold society. After all, they were right to fear. They HAD the right. They could lose themselves in it, shriek like madmen, run naked to the tops of the mountains and scream all of their insecurities to the clouds as if someone were listening, and still, she would be beneath them.
	They did not know her world, the world of woman. They could not. It was foreign to them, devoid of all the pride and arrogance that made them who they were. If SHE slipped, no-one would even try to catch her. If SHE fell, she would meet that dark, empty life they called death still alone, still lost, still  gripped by fear, and the only memory of her would be the soft songs of the wind, lost on their deaf ears.
	Still, they fixed their eyes ahead, refusing to look up, down, anywhere. Why did THEY fear? They'd had everything they could possibly have needed handed down to them since the day they were born, they had done everything they could to prepare. They had trained on gruelling courses, pushed themselves to the very limits of their endurance, learned all that they could learn.
	SHE knew why.
	She knew the one thing that none of them could ever understand, the one thing that could save them in the face of these overwhelming odds.
	Would it save her?
	She didn't know.
	Nobody knew.
	Nobody cared.
	She set her chin, squared her shoulders. The time of the test was upon her, and there was nothing left to do. She would meet it as herself - nothing more, nothing less.