Once upon a time, there lived two brothers in a town called Watsons. The younger brother Sam was very kind hearted and nice to everyone where else the older brother Charles was very mean and greedy. When their parents passed away, the older brother Charles took all the money that their parents have left for them to share and kicked Sam and his family out of the house that they have been  living together.

Sam begged. “Please Charles, let me and my family stay here just for this winter, it is too cold outside, and we have nowhere to go…”

But, mean Charles didn’t make a flinch at Sam’s crying and begging but harshly kicked him and his family out.

Poor Sam and his family headed to the mountains where they could build a temporary hut to live in. Sam and his wife worked hard every day without a rest to feed their children but because they had nine children, it was often hard to feed all of them and most of them were left starving. And at nights, the cold wind blew into the poorly built hut.

“Daddy, it’s too cold and I’m hungry!”  The whining from the children didn’t stop.

Sam could no longer bare to look at his starving children, so he went to see Charles. Sam got down on his knees and begged “Please Charles, lend me some money, I’ll pay you back next year” Charles yelled at Sam “Hey! Who said you could come back here? Get out of my house!” Charles grabbed a bat and beat Sam up and kicked him out. Sam sobbed his way back to the hut empty handed.

After a cold winter passed, warm spring came. One day, a stranded puppy who was limping on one leg and looking lost came into Charles’s house to rest. He took a corner of Charles’s large backyard and lied down, shivering in pain. When Charles saw the puppy, he yelled with a bat on his hand “Get lost! There is no room for you to rest!” He swung the bat at the puppy, purposefully hitting the wounded leg. The puppy screamed in pain and ran away.

The puppy limped his way up the mountain, trying to find a place to rest. His wound was getting worse because Charles had hit him. When the puppy could no longer walk, he passed out in the middle of the mountain. Sam who was on his way back from work saw the puppy and brought him back to his house where he cured the puppy’s leg and gave him food and water. Sam and his family took care of the puppy with consistent love and care until his leg was all cured. Once the puppy could fully walk again, he took off.

A year passed since then and when spring came again, the puppy came back and sat in front of Sam’s house, waving his tail. Sam greeted the puppy with excitement and petted the puppy’s head. The puppy then dropped something on Sam’s hand from his mouth and ran off. It was a small seed. Sam planted the seed in his backyard and took care of it until it grew into a tree. There were strange fruits that Sam had never seen growing on the tree. Once the tree was full of fruits, fruits started to fall off from the tree one by one. Sam picked up one of the fruits that was on the ground. When Sam picked up the fruit, it cracked open in half and jewels and money popped out from the fruit.

“Horray!” Sam yelled in excitement. He got his wife and his children to show them the magical fruit. Sam and his family celebrated together. They no longer had to suffer from the cold or hunger anymore. The fruits brought Sam’s family wealth and they moved to a nice house. Upon hearing the news that Sam became rich, Charles ran to see Sam and to ask him about how he became rich all the sudden. Sam told Charles about the story of how he took care of the puppy and puppy gave something back to him.

“What? It was a puppy that gave you all this wealth?” Charles said it with deep regret. He had remembered how the puppy had come to his house first, but he was cruel to the puppy and kicked him out.

Charles sighed “I should have been nicer to the puppy and take care of it first…”

Sam replied “Well, it’s too late. Once a story is told, it cannot be called back. You should have been careful with your actions.”

Reflections 

I have not written many stories and it was very difficult to think of one since there was a set ending that I had to reach to. So I thought about the moral of the story first which could not change. I worked backwards when creating the story, from the end to the start. Since the moral was something that would be taught to children, I thought about children’s story books that have a simple story line and is easy to tell. When I was telling the story to my friends and family, I found myself telling it with facial expressions and hand movements like I was reading it to the children. I could carry out the story with my own pace and put emphasis on where the excitement was in the story when telling it but when I was writing it down I couldn’t do that so I found it difficult to place emphasis on parts of the stories where I wanted there to be excitement.

I’m unsure if the readers will read the story with the same tone I had intended to with the story but I tried my best by making it simple with short sentences like a children’s book. I wonder if there is a story writing skill that sets the tone of the story and make it intend to sound a certain way in the reader’s head. When I read the story that I have written again, I myself read it differently than when I told the story. I wonder if pictures of written stories set the atmosphere and tone of the story like voice tone and expression does for oral stories?