In The Cellar by Robyn

This is a story I wrote for the Cricket writing contest.
When I got the letter in the mail that I had won it made me realize that that I like writing and that I can do it.

One stormy night Violet lay shivering in her bed listening to the thunder crashing and the rain pitter-pattering on the roof overhead. Her room in this old house that her family had just moved into seemed empty and eerie. "Oh I wish I could be in our old house where I knew that it was safe," she thought to herself.

Suddenly, as the noise of the storm moved away, she thought she heard another scarier sound. A whimpering noise was coming from the cellar directly underneath her room. She got nervously out of bed and crept toward the cellar to check it out. Before she got there her mother ,who was busily unpacking the kitchen, stopped her.

"Go back to bed, Violet," her mom said.

"But mom..."

Her mom cut her off. "Go back to bed now, Violet!"

Violet went sulkily back to bed.

The whimpering sound continued. Finally around midnight she couldn't stand it anymore! She had to find out what it was! She got out of bed again and tiptoed quietly over to the cellar.

It was pitch black as she entered the cellar. She needed a flashlight. She soundlessly stole back up to her room, got a flashlight out of her backpack and tiptoed back to the top of the stairs leading down to the cellar.

As she entered the cellar something growled uneasily at her from behind the furnace. Violet carefully crept over to the furnace and found the source of the growl and the whimpering. It was a big black dog.

His foot was stuck in a rat trap. She gently whispered kind words to the dog until it let her take his foot out of the rat trap. She found the dog some food and gently led him back to bed. Both Violet and the dog slept well in the safety of each other's company all the rest of that dark night.

Violet was thrilled the next morning when her parents let her keep the dog. They lived happily ever after.