The narrator’s (closest friend, lover, parent, brother, sister, you decide who to kill…) was in an accident, is at the hospital, and will not last until morning.  He or she dresses furiously, jumps in his or her car, get to the hospital, cursing at the slowness of traffic, and the stupidity of parking attendants, and arrive at the person’s bedside.  What happens next?  Describe the scene, be detailed.

My phone vibrates in my pocket, and when I look at the screen I see that my aunt Maureen is calling me. She lives in Miami, and has never called my cell phone before. She wastes no time with her point.

“Do you know which hospital your mom is in?”

“Um, what are you talking about Maureen? I didn’t know my mom was in the hospital.”

“Oh!… well I got a call from Jerry as they were driving to the hospital last night, they think she had a stroke, but I haven’t heard from him since, so I don’t have any more details.”

My knees buckle and I am sitting on the floor, tears immediately making many separate paths down my cheeks and neck, soaking into the collar of my shirt. Even though I started crying so quickly, I try to keep my voice steady for the rest of the phone conversation, but my it trembles and cracks anyway. Maureen tries to reassure me that everything will be fine, but I already know of her ignorance of the situation, so her comforting words are worthless to me.

My mind is racing with different options for how to get to my mom. I am at a church retreat in the mountains, eight hours away from my home and my family. I got here on a bus with the rest of my youth group, and do not have my own car to drive back with.

After Maureen hangs up the phone, I call my mom’s cell phone. It goes straight to voicemail. It might have run out of battery, but my better guess is that there is no service inside the hospital walls. Next, I call my Dad’s cell phone. I am determined to find out which hospital my mom is in, and to get to her as soon as I can. My parents are divorced, but my dad is not a heartless man and can hear the pain and urgency in my voice, so he finds a phone book and gives me a list of numbers for all the hospitals in the Richmond area.

It is the third hospital I call that the woman on the phone tells me, yes, my mom did check into a room as a patient. I ask to be transferred to that room’s phone, but there is no answer.

At this point, two of the youth group leaders have joined me in the room that I collapsed onto the floor in, listening intently to my phone conversations, putting the pieces together slowly. The new youth leader, Andy, who drove to the retreat separately, offers to drive me back immediately. Usually, I would be struck with guilt for putting someone out of their way like that, but my brain is consumed with this emergency, and I jump up to start packing my bags.

The sound of the door latch clicking is enough to stir Jerry. He lifts his head and opens his eyes, but makes no other movements with his body. I quietly walk towards him, kneeling beside the chair he is sitting in. We look at each other in silence for what seems like an hour, until he clears his throat and tells me of the brain damage from the stroke, and that my mom will not make it through the night.

I stop breathing. My eyes burn with hot tears. My emotions start to shift abnormally fast. I go from shock, to rage, to despair, to guilt, back to rage. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I had no warning of her impending death, and I didn’t get to tell her how much I love her. This is my biggest regret. I sob so hard that I begin to hyperventilate. Jerry puts his thick arms around my shoulders and squeezes me harder than he ever has. I don’t hug him back, I just use his body to prop me up while I soak the front half of his t-shirt with my tears and snot. In another fit of anger, I push him away from me and run out the door. I sprint through the hallways, attracting stares from nurses and patients alike, until I reach the front door of the hospital that I had come through. I continue to run through the long parking lot, past all the cars into the open pavement, where I find a lamp post to lean on. I sit in the parking lot, with my back to the hospital building, take out a pack of Marlboro Menthols, and start smoking like a chimney. I smoke six cigarettes in a row before I feel calm enough to walk back inside, defeated.

Kathleen poured herself another glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. She had told herself that she wouldn’t get drunk on weeknights anymore. It made getting ready for work the next morning a much longer process. Alas, here she sat, deep in the dark boxed-up room, deep in thought about what her life would have been like.

One night, over a game of air hockey, James had suggested that they move in together, and the idea was thrilling to Kathleen. She knew that she loved James, and to make things better, she knew that she would be able to live comfortably with him because they had similar standards for cleanliness and style. She had considered the scenario long before he brought it up. There was only one kink in their plan; they had too many pets! Kathleen had one dog and two cats, while James had two dogs. Both Kathleen’s apartment and James’ apartment were too small to fit that many animals in. So they decided to buy a slightly bigger apartment for them to merge their lives together.

It didn’t take long for each of them to sell their prospective apartments, because they were in the cheaper range for the neighborhood they were in. James had gotten most of his stuff moved into the new apartment before he started to help Kathleen transfer her boxes. The process was almost complete when James got into a car accident.

Kathleen had become numb to her sorrow from telling the story to so many people. It made her seem calloused, which she was painfully aware of each time she repeated the sequence of events. Nobody except for her parents and James’ parents knew that she had kept the apartment. It just didn’t seem right to sell it. Even though Kathleen had lots of James’ knick-knacks and belongings, she still felt this overwhelming sense that the apartment was the last part of James that was tangible. The last thing she could hold onto.

All too often she would come home from work, grab a bottle of wine and a matchbox for her full pack of cigarettes, and sit down in the middle of the living room. Amongst an array of square memories, she would let the sun set her into darkness, and try to imagine what the space would have looked like if James were still there to fill it.

[There is a pyramid made of stone located next to some railroad tracks in Fredericksburg. I’m not sure what its’ purpose is, although I’ve been told that it was used during the war as some sort of signal about the city for people passing by on the trains. I told my dad about the first time that I visited this pyramid, and he knew exactly what I was talking about, since he travels from Richmond to Washington, D.C. on the train often. I’m surprised that he didn’t look up the purpose of the pyramid and report back to me since he’s one of those history gurus that gets excited about things like that.]

In this dream I was walking along the old battleground site near this pyramid. Along the top of the hill, there are remnants of what used to be trenches for the military men to stand in for protection as they shot towards their enemy that was proceeding up the hill. The trenches are not as deep now as they once were, due to natural weathering and erosion of the soil. However, it is still clear where the trenches used to be. The Earth’s surface tried to heal the deep cuts that were dug into it, but it wasn’t able to heal completely, and so there is still evidence of a scar.

In my dream, as I walked along the trench, it slowly became clear to me that I was walking on human skin. When skin gets cut, it is usually able to regenerate enough new skin cells to heal back up completely. But if the cut is deep enough, then a scar will be left behind. I was walking along a scar, with the clumps of dirt looking more and more like pores as I continued on. I took a break from my focus on the wounded landscape and diverted my attention to the trees around me.  Before my very eyes, the trees began to morph, with the branches and leaves slowly folding upward against the bigger limbs, creating a slender silhouette. The trees were turning into hairs, the trunks making the hair follicles pertinent. I was microscopic, traveling along a human’s mutilated skin, with the hairs on the skin standing tall above me.

I decided not to eat pizza before I went to bed again.

What does this woman want? Write about what she misses, covets, regrets, dreams of, longs for, deeply desires. What does she want for her daughter? How much of this will she be willing to tell the daughter? What will she admit to no one? Will the daughter share her desires?

This woman wishes that she could go back to her own childhood, so that she could make better decisions with the wisdom that she has now. If only she had known better or at least had somebody to tell her. She had seven siblings growing up, and two hard-working parents who spent every waking hour trying to provide for their children. Her father spent his days working in the fields or walking many miles to try and sell his crops in town. While her mother was kept busy with the housework and farm animals, as well as her eight children running around. Although this woman’s parents tried their hardest, she didn’t receive much personal attention or guidance, and was mostly able to do as she pleased.

This woman wishes that she had gotten more of an education when she had the chance to. She was one of the few girls in the cluster of houses around her who had enough money to attend primary school. Every day she walked four miles to the brick skeleton of a building that served as a school house, and she was the quickest to learn amongst the hoards of boys who went with her. But when she was 10 and it was time for her to graduate to secondary school, she knew that she was needed at home to help her mom take care of her younger brothers and sisters, so she stopped going to school.

It only took a few more years before this woman went a step further to relieve her parents of the burden of her care-taker. She was a beautiful young teenager, naturally stunning with her long glistening hair and tanned skin from working in the sun every day. She had many suitors, but none that she was particularly smitten with. If she were to be married, it would be one less mouth for her parents to feed. Alas, she got married at 14 and moved away from her family.

When her daughter is older, this woman will have no shame in admitting her mistakes for the sake of preventing her young one from repeating them. She will make sure that her daughter stays in school for as long as she is able to, and doesn’t marry young because she feels she cannot make it without the support of somebody else.

Write a paragraph about a thrilling or anguishing incident from your childhood or adolescence. Evoke the emotion you felt in images of all five senses how the scene (perhaps including your own body) looked to you, sounded, felt, smelled, tasted. Allow yourself whatever personification, metaphor, or simile occurs to you, no matter how extreme.

Maggie had been skiing since she was four years old. I, on the other hand, had never latched a ski onto my foot in my short 14 years of life. At first, Maggie didn’t seem to mind sticking by my side as I struggled to stay upright on the bunny hills of Snowshoe Mountain. After a few practice rounds, I could sense her impatience to join the rest of her experienced family on the other slopes. In a moment of naivety, I agreed to join her on Black Diamond.

It took me a painfully long time to make my way down the death trap of a course. I would start down the slope, but as soon as I started to pick up speed, I would become struck with fear and fall over intentionally. Every time I did this, I would remove one or both of my skis to stand up and position the skis diagonally so I could fall over on the other side of the slope, further down the mountain. I watched other people fly past me, zigzagging their skis back and forth, and I tried to evoke the inspiration of monkey see, monkey do. I began with the front end of my skis pointed straight down, and as the metal started to slide over the compacted snow, I did my best to imitate the side-to-side motion with my hips and legs straining to keep my speed at a manageable level. This was a failed attempt.

I turned my skis too sharply and ended up facing backwards for a few seconds before my skis crossed in front of me. As my body tumbled backwards, my right leg twisted, and a bomb detonated in my knee. (I later found out that I had partially torn my ACL and completely torn my MCL, two of the four major ligaments in the human knee.) I landed on my back with a thud, and had the wind knocked out of me. As I struggled to take a breath, the tears began to pour out of my eyes. I wasn’t crying in the same way that I would if I were mourning a relative at a funeral, but more like the tears that automatically form when cutting up an onion. The pain was intense and throbbing, and my body produced a waterfall of salt in response. The trail of tears traveled up my forehead into my hairline before absorbing into my beanie, because I was lying upside down on the steep slope. It didn’t take long for the cold to set in, since a great deal of snow had forced its’ way into every opening in my clothing as I collided with the ground.

Eventually, Maggie realized that I was no longer behind her, and she took off her skis and walked up the mountain to where I lay. She took my skis off, and stuck them vertically into the snow, producing an ‘X’ above me so that oncoming speed demons wouldn’t run over me. Her brother, Charlie, went to the bottom of the mountain to alert authorities that I needed to be picked up and taken to the hospital. Maggie stayed with me, put my head in her lap, and relayed inside jokes between us to try to divert my attention away from the agony I was in. A crowd had formed around me because of the scene that I had made, and one particular middle-aged man just happened to be present when one of Maggie’s shenanigans made me laugh—in the middle of a sob. This stranger man took it upon himself to ski to the bottom of the mountain and tell the Snowshoe employees that I was going to be fine, because he had seen me laughing.

It took an hour for the rescue snowmobile to come for me.

No morning smile, this
love between us is
a long river running.

I dreamt I was tangoing with
you, you held me so close
I heard my muscles singing.

I have died and dreamed
myself back to your arms where
what I died for sleeps.

Your quick hand never was as fast as my
barking cries for you to breathe and stop.
Fortunately, memories fade as I drive by.

I could not be forced to turn a blind eye
against the abstract thought of lover’s knot.
The solemn truth came out, I can’t deny.

The quiet puts things back up as I cry
myself away from promptly getting caught
by unfortunate memories as I drive by.

Leave me like you found me, but don’t lie
to yourself about what you said you thought.
Fortunate memories fade as I drive by,
the solemn truth came out, I can’t deny.

She has her chores,
but mine are worse
and when she whines
I’m forced to go with her.

How should I feel?
Doing Jill’s work
while my friends are playing
catch in the park.

As we get closer to the well
Jill only gets worse.
She pulls my hair and
wipes her boogers on me.

We reach the top of the hill
and she hands me the pail.
This is so unfair–
She never does anything!

I know Mom has said
I shouldn’t hit girls,
but Jill doesn’t act like a girl,
so I pinch her arm.

Without a second thought
Jill puts both hands
around my shoulders
and pushes me down the hill.

But wait–
Jill knows just as well as I do,
if I come home with bumps and bruises
and her without a scratch?
Mom will suspect
foul play at work
so Jill came tumbling after.

The dark green fabric
doesn’t show the tea stains.
Tiny ridges of corduroy
that pop when I run my finger over them quickly.
One threadbare arm
shows the picking of a fidgety child.

My mom brings a book
to the body of the pillow,
and I snuggle in beside her
claiming my spot.

As I play with the loose threads
she reads aloud,
her gentle voice
soothing me to sleep.

walk through   ≈