FFF Winner: A. Karina!

This week's FFF winner is A. Karina, an author and regular One-Minute Writer who is just 9 years old. I'm impressed with her creativity and ability to pull a story's elements together! A. K. is in 4th grade and likes to read, write, and draw.

We were all coming home from a party that night when our car slipped on some black ice. Screeeech!! And we went into a ditch. Nobody was hurt, but we couldn't get the car out. We decided to hike back to the gas station we had just passed.

The lights were out and the whole place was dark when we got there. Grace was scared. We thought we could see someone moving inside, so we knocked on the door. A creepy looking man opened the front door, but when he turned on the lights it was just the cashier. Phew. The lights were still so dim we couldn't see the cashier's face. We told him we were stuck. He offered to let us stay through the storm on an old air mattress in the back and tried to sell us junk food, soda and lottery tickets. We decided to buy some scratch-off tickets, and we won! We ran over and told the cashier. He just smiled a weird grin and said it was our lucky night after all.

The three of us girls cuddled together on the old air mattress and tried to get some sleep that night, but it was hard. We were so scared! Everything looked creepy in the dark, and we thought we could hear voices whispering around us. Just as we were all finally dropping off, after midnight, there was a creak and a loud SNAP in the silence. I felt like I was falling, like the air was coming out of the mattress. Then I realized the floor had broken trough and all of us really were falling!

Good thing we had that mattress to land on, because Grace and Skyler and I broke right through the old floor and landed in a cloud of dust in this dark, damp, cold basement underneath the old gas station. We got up and tried to look around. Skyler walked forward and almost tripped over something. When she looked down, it was a human body! We were terrified, and when we looked around we saw more skeletons!

We were panicked and Grace ran towards the back to get away. She slipped on something. But it wasn't a body, it was money! Lots of money. We figured out that the cashier had been killing all the lottery ticket winners who came in and stealing their money. We looked through the money and then we found a hole. We went through a dark tunnel, and saw light in the distance. We walked toward it and discovered that we were outside again. It was morning, and the ice had melted around our car. So we loaded up the money we had won and drove away.