Personal Narrative-Blood Brothers

1400 Words3 Pages

Trapped men seeing their mates through the dusty fog, recognizing them, their hopes rose: their mates wouldn’t let them die. But many couldn’t be reached until the fires had been put out, until steel had been cut away, until the emergency workers could stabilize the slab. They screamed and cried for what seemed like hours but even after they stopped the survivors kept hearing them. Most of the men who survived the collapse, who were not injured didn’t go home, instead they joined fireman and police, and men from neighbouring factories who’d raced down to the Bridge to help. Picking up shovels and crowbars, and sledgehammers, digging through rocks and rumble, cutting through steel beams with oxygen torches, they tried to untangle the mess. They went out on the police dinghies to search the river. They dived under the fallen concrete and iron. The sludge and mud clung to them, coating their skin, weighing them down, making it difficult for them to breathe, to keep their eyes open, to find the bodies of their mates and pull them out of the river. And then they carried the bodies onto the road, and the Salvos covered them in white sheets. On the site, commotion and noise, on the roa the bodies in a long line, silent and still. Antonello lost all …show more content…

I know. I have to go back, Sandy.’ He pulled away and she let go of his hand. As he made his way back towards the wreckage, he passed a crushed helmet and next to it a mangled red lunch box, one of those bright plastic things like the ones the school kids carried earlier that day, too small to hold lunch for a grown man working at a hard physical job. He imagined a little girl, like Molly, helping her mother to pack her father’s lunch, ‘Daddy’s lunch box is like mine’. Antonello kicked the lunch box out of his way, but it only moved a couple of inches. The ground was rubble and mud and oil and blood, the emergency workers were carrying in sacks of sand to cover the ground but there wouldn’t ever be enough

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