Raindrops trickled down as the party was in full swing. What was a perfect Saturday on the white sands off the coast of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and break from research for a health communication for development media platform, came to a close as the sun set in tandem with the incoming storm. The real fun was about to begin. Theo, an Australian who had worked in the Solomons for the past year and one of the friends I made, started his car and we moved from the beach to a dirt road within bush approaching the main road. The trail to the road was getting muddier by the second. We moved at the pace of our surroundings. A few moments passed, then, the passenger-side window shattered into small pieces falling onto my body. I feel small trickles of blood falling down my arm from my cheek where a few shards cut me. Theo immediately stopped the car. We sat shell-shocked. We couldn’t see the culprit, but we saw the tool - a large rock. After surveying the damage on the car, we started to move again as Theo contacted the local police station on his cell phone. We didn’t get to...
that he go see if anyone needed help. He drove around the area but saw nothing
He continues to talk to the car it asks him why he is talking and
“It was just one more crack in the stone. Eventually the stone broke down and became gravel, leaving me a nervous wreck” (“David”).
please let him in? As he spoke, he kept looking over his shoulder at a car parked right
Langston Hughes uses poetic elements to express the reader his feelings towards America. Langston Hughes is very upset that America is not what it promised to be. Living in America, he never saw America to be the land of the free, what it promised to be. Instead, he saw America to be cruel to him and now wants to change America to be the country of the free he thought it was. He expresses all his emotion about America, in his poem, Let America Be America Again, by using connotative diction, repetition, narrative tone and organization; poetic elements.
I climbed upstairs, seething with a rage mixed with adolescent hormones and self pity. I reached my bedroom, threw back the drapes, approached the window from where the air conditioner was perched and jerked open the window. To my horror, the air conditioner tumbled backwards out the window, end over end and landed squarely on the roof of my fathers two day old Buick. The Buick roof crumpled like a piece of paper. Meanwhile, the air conditioner had bounced off the car and landed sharply on our paved driveway. The whole incident took no more than a few seconds and yet my mind played it back in horrific, slow motion. I surveyed the scene. My dad's Buick looked like somebody had taken a sledge hammer and swung a lethal blow to its middle. The air conditioner lay in a heap of scrap metal beside the car.
“ You pasted a stop sign, then a stop light, and almost caused a car crash,” he said “ can you please step out of the vehicle.”
As I inched my way toward the cliff, my legs were shaking uncontrollably. I could feel the coldness of the rock beneath my feet when my toes curled around the edge in one last futile attempt at survival. My heart was racing like a trapped bird, desperate to escape. Gazing down the sheer drop, I nearly fainted; my entire life flashed before my eyes. I could hear stones breaking free and fiercely tumbling down the hillside, plummeting into the dark abyss of the forbidding black water. The trees began to rapidly close in around me in a suffocating clench, and the piercing screams from my friends did little to ease the pain. The cool breeze felt like needles upon my bare skin, leaving a trail of goose bumps. The threatening mountains surrounding me seemed to grow more sinister with each passing moment, I felt myself fighting for air. The hot summer sun began to blacken while misty clouds loomed overhead. Trembling with anxiety, I shut my eyes, murmuring one last pathetic prayer. I gathered my last breath, hoping it would last a lifetime, took a step back and plun...
This can’t be happening thought Bill. Man I’m in so much trouble, there’s no way I can get out of it. I’m stuck. Bill had just wrecked his parent’s BMW in an accident, and they had no idea that the expensive car was even missing from the garage. And a terrible thing had happened as a result of the crash. A young woman lay dead in the passenger side of the vehicle, swarmed by medics. Bill had escaped injury, but as his body was still at the crash site, his mind wasn’t. He was in total shock at what had happened. If I only left the car in the garage and didn’t try to “borrow” it, Lisa might still be alive….Bill tried to imagine that it wasn’t real, that he was in his bed dreaming, but no, he was responsible for the destruction of his parents’ car and his the death of his girlfriend. It was as if his mind wasn’t registering, as if it was in some far away place. He just couldn’t come to grips with what had happened. This is a classic example of severe shock. The event that took place was so strong that the mind has trouble working. While in Bill’s case where he had indeed had an accident, the realism of the situation dwarfs the mind as if a small comet hurtled towards a blazing sun. But this is just one aspect of realism. The whole of realism is made up of the fact that our lives, the world, the universe, it’s all real. And as much as our minds would want to deny it, everything will stay real, and for most people they just make the best of it. But for the rest of the people, they invent new ways to get around the feeling that a wall has been placed in their path. All this goes to say that people must be original and “keep it real” to survive the physical and mental fatigue life throws at them and also that everything will always be real and we must be in touch with our minds to harvest the realness.
We went to go get into my car and it was missing “oh no!” we thought to ourselves what will we do?
After two plane rides and a long four hour bus trip all fifty of us finally arrived in Farmington, New Mexico. It was my first time being away from parents for more than a couple days and my first mission trip. I was extremely nervous. I thought the trip was gonna be a miserable ten days. It was the summer going into my senior year and before I left I was having a blast hanging out with my friends, going swimming, riding bikes, and relaxing every single day. The last thing I wanted to do was go on a church mission trip, but my parents insisted that I go. My parents said, it would be a, "great experience" and "life changing." They were right! I did not believe them until I got to the reservations. Met all the amazing Navajo Indians and learned
Disappointment, disbelief and fear filled my mind as I lye on my side, sandwiched between the cold, soft dirt and the hot, slick metal of the car. The weight of the car pressed down on the lower half of my body with monster force. It did not hurt, my body was numb. All I could feel was the car hood's mass stamping my body father and farther into the ground. My lungs felt pinched shut and air would neither enter nor escape them. My mind was buzzing. What had just happened? In the distance, on that cursed road, I saw cars driving by completely unaware of what happened, how I felt. I tried to yell but my voice was unheard. All I could do was wait. Wait for someone to help me or wait to die.
A shirt slipped over his head, BA quickly put on his sweats and headed out the door. Not heading for the car, he figured running the three blocks would be faster. When they arrived, police cars surrounded the place. An officer recognized the couple and motioned to come upstairs. In the apartment the crime scene people were already at work doing their thing.
He arrived at his first destination after about an hour of hiking. After a short while he figured he had looked over his new found haven enough, he was ready. He started down the grade with a small arsenal, consisting of a shovel, about ten granola bars, two bottles of power-ade, his snowshoes, and what was left in his hydration bladder in his pack. After descending about two hundred feet he came into the clearing he was hoping to find, it was as smooth as silk, twenty inches of fresh powder under his board. Up ahead he say a small but formidable drop off on the mountain, he knew if he was going to escape this with his dignity he was going to have to work some magic, to his success. The drop was approximately eighteen feet, but he was ready for it, he landed perfectly, it was like a dream the poof of snow exploding out from his impact, and the gentle flakes hitting his face. As he continued down the slope he did not realize that his gentle landing had severely weakened the physical structure of the mountain’s blanket, and that any moment he could bring the mass down upon himself at impossible speeds.
The reckless driver hit us straight on, then “Bang!” a loud noise resonated through the air, and abruptly my body flew out and hit the pavement of the road. Everything around me was simply a white haze for a few seconds after the impact. My body felt extremely heavy and the sharp pain throbbed throughout my face and body. Lying there on the rough asphalt, I faintly heard my mom and Carrie call out to me, “Sydney! Sydney! Are you okay? Answer me! Sydney!” I wanted I speak up and answer them, nonetheless, it was useless, my voice just wouldn’t make a sound. The desperation in Carrie’s and my mom’s voices reverberated to me across from where I was lying. My mom frantically ran up to my side and hugged me tightly in her arms. Blood was squirting out of her pinky, where the top of her finger had been severed. The places where my mom’s tears fell, stung my wounds, nevertheless, it was nothing compared to each little movements that caused the pains to electrify through my body severely. Every second was hell, the pain was just utterly agonizing and tormenting. Whether it was due to the pain or the exhaustion my body suffered, my mind slowly drifted off and I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. As my eyes gradually closed, the blazing siren seemed to have grown louder little by