First!

An excerpt from something I wrote for Creative Writing class at BYU. I love tadpoles. And mud. :) Why I can't write descriptions for my fantasy stories like this I don't know.

Every spring, my brothers and sister and I put on old shorts, older t-shirts, and rain boots and took some plastic containers down to the deeper parts of the creek to find tadpoles. If we remembered to go before May or June, they were everywhere you scooped—little black squirmy things with string for tails, swarming in the murk and the algae between the cattails. You could never get more than three or four or maybe five at a time, and at least two of them would be too small to tell apart from the swirls of green muck in their plastic containers. None of us ever proved that we had more than six. You couldn't in that water, scummy as it was. It was like looking for gold. You would think you could see sparkles, almost, but when you turned it or you looked too close it was just a rock after all. You can't really own a tadpole, and you can't keep it in one place. Next week's tadpoles would be different—even if they weren't different creatures, they'd be changed.

After we let the tadpoles go, we'd sit on the banks for a minute with weeds poking into our knees and empty the stinking water out of our boots, and on the way home we'd stop in the hollow under the bridge for a minute, just because we couldn't quite stand up there. There was always a piece of trash or two, stowed away like a stray cat—a granola bar wrapper, the plastic from a cafeteria lunch, an ancient drinking straw. It wouldn't make a good hideout unless you cleared out the trash, and found a way to keep more from sprouting.