“A Sad Memory”
By Ash Newbrey
Rain everywhere. Just
like the day I’ll never forget, June 19, 2017. Tomorrow will be six years since
the “accident,” and will it be rough… I remember it so clearly it almost hurts.
Luna and I were out in the woods, just walking around joking with each other,
the same as we always would. We would hop back and forth over the local creeks,
catch little frogs, and even climb some of the old oak trees. The magnificent
trees were so mature they seemed hollow, and with the parched barren earth
around us, the rain was a treacherous thing in these precious woods. Living
near the boundless ocean, terrible storms were also quite dangerous, especially
around this time of the year. Suddenly, the rain started getting harder. We
decided to climb into our favorite of the old trees–which we had tastefully
decorated with wildflowers and vines–and decided to wait there until the rain
slowed. We talked and giggled, telling jokes back and forth.
“Hey, Wyatt,” Luna was
asking me something, but who knows what yet. “How long,” she paused for a
moment, “do you think we should stay here? I mean, the ground is getting quite
muddy, and it seems to only be getting worse.”
“I think we will be
fine, but it should stop soon, so don’t worry, alright?” Oh, it’s just like
Luna to worry the way she does. She always had such horrible anxiety, and it
kept her from doing so many things. “See? It’s slowing down a bit now.” Her
face seemed to calm as I pointed out the calming rain, and she had the most
beautiful glint in her eyes.
Unknown to Luna, I had
the perfect ring in my pocket, waiting for the perfect moment. Her eyes would
light up, and be the most glorious shade of emerald-green. She’d laugh,
unbelieving of my proposal, and smile from ear to ear. Oh, how it genuinely
makes me smile to even think of her radiant happiness. She would sing and
dance, fondly imagining the lovely day of the already planned wedding, and
eagerly anticipate every possible second of it.
However, that’s when the
calm of the storm came to a stop. The wind got stronger, growling menacingly,
trying to be the thing to frighten us away from our extraordinary getaway in
these woods. Thinking back on that now, if only I had acted differently, she’d
still be here.
The relentless rain got
so hard it pricked our skin, becoming so ice-cold that it hurt. The harsh wind
was so loud and intense that it sounded like a train. We heard sirens, of what
sounded like an ambulance, in the distance. As terrifying as it seemed, if I
would have just kept both Luna and me calm, we both would have been perfectly
okay. But the violent storm raged on and adrenaline rushed through me, and I
knew we had to get to safety. As soon as I had come up with a plan, I hopped
down into the ankle-deep water below us, grasping a desperate hand out for Luna
to follow.
"Wyatt, will we
make it back home safe?" She was severely shaking, her extreme astraphobia
was striking her in the gut now. She asked the question timidly, her anxious
eyes filled with frantic terror. The storm was roaring, and I saw a vast wave
of water starting to rise from the nearby ocean. This definitely wasn’t timely.
As the ground became steadily over-saturated, I could feel it giving way below
my feet. We were sinking as the water was rising. Suddenly we heard loud
snapping, and both looked over in ghastly horror to see the great oak we were
sitting in earlier, crashing down towards us. I pulled Luna’s hand, but she was
ankle-deep in the mud and stuck in place. I forcibly pulled her as hard as I
could, pulling her as far away from it as I could get her before it struck
viciously. . .
She was crushed by the
tree. I couldn't even see her body, and she was under the tree, under the
water. As I rushed over, I heard a muffled cry and hurried to get her out. The
storm seemed to be easing up a bit, but the ocean’s water just kept coming for
us. I moved the hollow tree off of her the best I could and picked her up. Going
as fast as I could in the current conditions, I ran her inside and called 911.
That day in the hospital
was terrifying–cleaner smells were overwhelming, the beeping everywhere,
everything being white–it was all just a little too much.
“Good news and bad
news,” The doctor had just come in, his arms were behind his back.
“Is she going to make
it?” I timidly asked the question, hoping that even if she was a “vegetable”
she would still be alive.
“If,” he paused for a
breath, “we do brain surgery. A small piece of her skull that was crushed broke
off and is lodged inside her brain near the cerebral cortex. If we don’t remove
it in the next 4 hours, she won’t live.” He exhaled deeply.
“How,” I couldn’t find
my words, “how risky is it?” I was shaking with worry, a bad gut feeling that
things would go wrong.
“It’s a highly risky
surgery and could cause her to have some,” he paused and exhaled the next
statement, “issues.”
“Like what, exactly?”
“Quick emotion changes,
inappropriate reactions to things, and possibly only a few years left to live.”
He looked back at his notes. “She likely won’t make it past 35, however, we
will accomplish everything we can.”
“Anything to merely save
her.” I breathed out, gently held her hand, and watched as the experienced nurses
prepared her for surgery. I had such a bad gut feeling about this.
“Mr.Miles,” I heard a
concerned woman’s voice sadly announce my name, and as I jumped up she
delivered me the news. “We,” she paused thoughtfully, and I knew exactly what
was coming, “couldn’t save her. We persistently tried everything we could, but
we couldn’t perform the needed surgery without damaging more than we would
help.” A deep sadness rushed over me, and my world seemed to go dim. She
continued talking gently, but I couldn’t hear anything. She was gone. I would
never see her again. I was brought back to the present day by the sinking
feeling in my stomach and a pain in my heart. Tears covering my horrified face,
and the thunder roaring outside. If only I could have saved her.
“Half of the same coin”
By Will Giles
It was a hot summer
night when I started having my expected nightmares that started years ago.
2“Micheal, come
on, it's time to head down to the old house2” Jake said.
2I replied2 “I’m coming
Jake, hold on.”
0We walked down towards
the old house with our conversation2
0“Jake, Mom and Dad are
gonna kill us if they find out that we snuck out of the house.”
0“It was your idea,” my
brother said 2
0 “I know. I know.
Doesn’t mean I like it,” I said.
0“Well we have to
go.”
0“There it is,” I said
to Jake, “let’s head inside.”
0So, we went inside, and
I almost forgot what I was looking for, but then Jake reminded me.
0“Hurry up we have to
find that old and rusty coin, and 2dad went crazy when he thought he lost it.”
“Ok, we should split up
and see who gets it first.”
“Whoever wins gets the
last pop tart from home.”
“Deal.”
“Deal,” I said with a
smile, imagining the last strawberry pop tart.
I had to win, I said to
myself.
I started to wonder how
I would be able to find the old coin when this roof could fall in at any time
if it decided we weren’t welcome anymore.
I looked and looked, but
I couldn’t find anything I was about to give up when I heard a large bang.
I quickly turned around
and walked backwards scared not knowing what it was so I cried out
“Jake!”
Silence ran through the
house
I did it again “Jake!” I
yelled so loud our own parents probably heard but, still nothing. I got up and
started running through the house yelling not knowing what’s going on.
“Jake!”
Then as I came to the
living room I noticed that it wasn’t there. It was gone like a rabbit in a hat,
then I looked up noticing the increased darkness, it was the roof. The roof
came down. I started scrambling the pieces off of the living room. I saw
something, I saw someone, I dug some more than I saw his face, I saw Jake. I
dug around him more and more faster and faster where blisters were staining my
hand red. Then I noticed it wasn’t blisters, it wasn’t my blood, it was Jakes.
I kept digging all confused when I saw his hand, I noticed something in it when
I looked, all it was was half of the coin. It was half of the old coin.
FIVE YEARS LATER
I walked to his grave
with an item in my hand and started talking to him.
“Hey it’s Micheal I
don’t know if you remember me, sorry for not visiting enough. I’m sorry for a
lot of things. I’m mainly sorry about taking you to that house where you died.
I just came here really to say I’m sorry and to give you this.”
I placed the half coin
on the grave and said I’m sorry one last time and started walking away
“Sibling Love”
By:
Marco Garcia
My name is John and me
and my family have had a bit of a falling out. Two years ago my father died,
and in his will he said he wanted me and my sister to split the money he saved
up 50/50. However I couldn't make it to the funeral and when I finally
came down to my hometown where he was buried. My sister had taken my share and
used it for her son's medical bills. Later on I still told her that she had to
pay me back. It was a total of $20,000. Her insurance was terrible, and she
still had to pay $25,0002. I was furious that she used my money to pay
off her son's surgery and not her own. Turns out she used her half to pay off
her debt. So she didn't have anything left, but I still made her pay me back,
and I deeply regret it. It wasn't her fault that her son was hit by a drunk
driver and was severely injured. Sometimes I apologize to her because of my
guilt that I made her life even more stressful because now she was working to
pay me back.
June 8, 2019
So here I am. At my lake house watching the birds feed
off the worms that have come out the ground. I'm sitting on an old lawn chair
my dad gave to me years before he passed. My phone starts to buzz in my pocket
so I reach and grab it. A text from my sister but I ignore it and keep looking
at the moving water .The phone buzzes again, and again, again, again, and again
finally I open the messages.
You need to come over.
Now.
We need to talk
It's about jack.
Jack is her 17 year old
son, What is it? I respond.
Jack has been in a car
wreck.
I'll be over soon, I replied.
Deep down I felt like I
was lying. I've met the kid twice for about an hour in total in my life. When
he was a baby and when on his 14 birthday. So I felt I had to be worried on
purpose because we share some of the same blood, but deep down I felt like I
didn't care. So I went with my gut and decided that instead of lying to my
sister's face and acting worried, I just wouldn't show up at all. Sure it
sounded harsh but i just got $20,000 put into my bank account and i was
gonna spend it on a very needed vacation. I had made it big on the stock
market two years ago. I gave some of the money to dad and mom, but I didn't
give any to Ella. She always thought she was better than everyone, but then she
married a moron of a husband and had a son then he took off with zero notice.
Not really my problem. I get into my car and drive to my apartment in downtown
Atlanta. I get my clothes packed and and take the elevator back down to the
lobby. My phone buzzes again.
John, please we need to talk, It seemed important
but I didn't really care.
Listen whatever you need from me ur not gonna get it.
I'm sorry about Jack but I gtg. I responded quickly. It felt much better
just telling her that I didn't want to waste my time.
June 19, 2019
I finally went back to Atlanta To visit mom. She had
called me when I was in England, so I thought it would be nice to see a
familiar face. When I pulled into her driveway I noticed Ella’s car already in
the driveway. I park and go inside and see them eating at the table so I walk
in and greet them. I thought it was gonna play out terribly because of how I
turned down Ella, but it was great. We laughed and talked the whole time, but
Ella mentions my money.
“ So John, I'm sorry but the money dad left to you…” she
pauses, “ I used it on Jack's hospital bills.”
I felt like
everything was in slow motion, I zoned out. MY money, MY. It belonged to me for
my use. “ Ella, that's my money. Why would you do that?”
“ You never came over to
talk about it. You had places to be remember?”
Me, mom, and Ella
Finally agreed to make Ella pay me back my money. Now that saw Ella struggling
to make the money I started to realize that this is wrong of me to be doing.
She can't control what happened to Jack, but I can control what I tell my
sister. This is greed, And I will not let it consume me.
“The Night”
By MaKayla Jackson
January 23, 1993. I was arrested for a crime I did not know I’d
commit. For three years, I was wanted. For three years, I was on the run.
July 12, 1989, my birthday. I went to The Night, a club I usually
never went to, only on special occasions. Although I had little money to spend,
I couldn’t bring myself to care. I had just lost my job, one of the many that
I’ve lost. I looked around for any familiar faces. As I scanned the crowd, a
familiar voice startled me.
“You're not looking for me, are you JJ?” asked someone from behind
me.
“Andre!” I exclaimed, throwing my arms around my brother.
“I heard you got fired from Wal-mart,” he said, trying to contain
his laughter.
“I didn’t get fired. I quit,” I said, sticking my tongue out at
him.
“Ok ok,” he said, “I surrender. I gotta head out. I’ll
call you Journey,” he said.
I was sad that I was yet
again left alone, but I would be fine. I walked away from the entrance and to
the bar.
“Journey,” I heard someone whisper from behind me. I spun
around to be met by my cousin Te.
“Te, how have you been?”
“No talking JJ, follow me,” she said, pulling me into a
dark alley.
As we walked into the
alley, I started to question, “What does she want with me?”
“You’re probably wondering what I want to talk about JJ.
I heard you talking to Andre about money, so I wanted to take you up on an
offer of mine,” Te said.
“Ok…” I said, skeptical about the situation before me.
“ I need you to drive from point A, to point B.”
“A New Annoyance”
By Ash Newbrey
Showering on its own isn’t that difficult, however, when
you add another element to a usual routine of yours, it can quickly become
frustrating. That “element” could be new hair dye that you have to wash
carefully, a wound or broken bone that you have to avoid, or a new piercing
that you have to try your absolute hardest to avoid at all costs. For me, it
was the latter. I had gotten my nose pierced roughly 4 weeks prior, so the
piercing was definitely still new. Unable to take it out yet to shower and
properly wash my face, I had to avoid it no matter what. Of course, that was
highly tricky.
I went to grab the washcloth I use to wash my face, and
as I did I got a bad gut feeling. Naturally, I then put in even more effort to
avoid hitting or catching it with the cloth, which is where things went bad.
Just out of habit I washed my face as if it weren’t there, and it got caught. I
had not yet realized that the jewelry was stuck on the cloth yet, and as I went
to pull it in a different direction I had a sharp pain on the side of my nose.
The piercing was almost fully ripped out of my nose. No blood, so injury, but a
lot of pain. I rushed out of the shower and grabbed my towel to make sure
things were okay in the mirror, and surely enough, it was there. Hanging
halfway out of the hole, and about to fall in the sink. This started the
treacherous journey of things catching my nose piercing.
Most people think that maintaining a piercing is easy.
You clean it, change it, whatever. What they don’t realize, especially having
one on a commonly touched area of your face, really can be a struggle. With the
Covid-19 pandemic, wearing masks is a must in public areas, and a properly worn
mask should be covering both your nose and your mouth. That right there is the
annoying bit, certain fabric masks or ones with the metal to shape it around
your nose tend to be like a magnet to my nose piercing. Of course, being in
public, say at a restaurant, is one of the few places you can temporarily
remove your mask. And this is what I was doing. I went to remove my mask to eat
my food, then I realized it was caught on my nose ring. So I awkwardly looked
at a reflective surface and silently tried to untangle myself, with eventual
success, and then ate my food, my annoyance at the piercing growing evermore.
These are just a few examples of this, and it’s not the only struggle.
“Did it hurt?” my mom asked me on the car ride home after
getting my nose pierced.
“A bit, yea. Worse than I was expecting, but definitely
not bad,” I replied to her quickly, using my cold fingers to soothe the
irritated area. There was a small amount of blood, a drop or two, but other
than that it was clean.
“Well don't mess with it too much or it'll bleed,” She
replied, that mom-tone in her voice.
“I know mom, I know,”
Later that day when we got back home, sleeping was a nightmare. I couldn’t lay
on the side I usually do or it would hurt, but eventually, as it healed I could
sleep normally. Well, about 3 weeks after it was pieced, I decided to try
sleeping normally with my face buried into this giant dragon of mine who I
named Felix. Well when I woke up, there was crusted blood around my half-way in
nose ring. I pulled my face away from Felix, and it pulled the ring almost
completely out of my nose because it was caught on Felix. I quickly ran to the
bathroom to fix the situation, as my irritation at the new piercing grew.
“Something that Bugs Me”
By Will Giles
Whenever I am bored I would get on instagram to text my
friends, family, or even people I don't really like. The only problem with
texting them is that they are always doing something, so I’m waiting about
three hours for them to text me back. Then whenever they text me back it's been
awhile and most of the time I am not bored anymore or I’m too lazy to text them
back.
One memorable time of
this happening is when I texted one of my friends at night where I said “Hey”
and I rambled a bit to see if she would respond which later I found out she
wouldn't that night since she was asleep. Then she texted me at about 10:00
responding to my text saying “Hey” and at the time I was watching a movie. When
the movie was over I checked my phone and saw the message which I replied with
“How’s life” and I waited about five minutes for her to text me back then I
started to watch another movie. About thirty minutes into the movie she replied
with “decent how about you.” This cycle continued on for about 4 more hours
until I got tired and just stopped texting all together.
Like I said before
whenever I text someone and it takes a while for them to respond it bugs me
tremendously. It’s just really annoying for me to text someone and wait for
them to respond and it’s always the people that I really want to talk to. So
really what I’m getting at here is just respond to my text it’s uncomfortable
to just wait around and then finally when you do text I’m doing something then
I stop doing something and text you and it just goes on and on and on again
until one of us gets annoyed to the point where we stop texting.
“Broken Doors and Broken Feelings.”
By: Marco Garcia
Me and my brother were the sons of a stubborn
rancher. He always wanted to get something new even if it hurt his wallet
a little. At this so-called ranch of ours we had chickens, cows, and goats.
With me playing sports, and dad being at work it's really up to my brother to
take care of all the animals. Although it may sound like I get a free pass from
the work, it's not. On the weekends me and him have to work together to build
or repair something to make the work life easier for us. That means makeshift
doors out of plywood and chicken wire, and fixing the doors to our shed where
we keep the animal feed. Well one sunny day I saw the look on his face.
“ The doors fell off the shed again,” he said, “ Let's go
grab that spare plywood dad has and replace that one door.”
At first it sounded
ugly, an exposed piece of wood but as I thought about it I realized that it
would be an easy fix. So I agreed and we went searching for the spare
construction wood we had. We walked to the back of the storage shed that we
have that conveniently is not too far from the other. The shed had every type
of wood available east of the Mississippi, from oak, pine, river birch, cypress
and even cherry. I found the old plywood that we spent about 30 minutes
searching for, and it was laying flat on the cool georgia dirt. It looked
healthy enough so I tried standing it upright when it slipped from my right
hand. I quickly reacted to stop it from slamming into the ground to avoid
further damage to it. When I did I placed my right hand on the bottom of the
board. I felt a quick sharp pain in the palm of my hand. Worried a spider may
have bit me I dropped the board and looked at my hand. Only to see a small red
and white spot on my hand. I looked a little closer and I saw a little black
speck in the center, a splinter. Ohh the one of many things that I despise in
this world. I knew it would be a pain in the behind to try and get this small
piece of wood out of my hand. I knew the routine, I must go to the bathroom and
stab the tips of my moms tweezers into my hand to try and remove it. The look
brother gave me just screamed, STUPID. I knew it would take about 10 minutes to
just remove it. Oh it reminded me of the time I got three in one day on the
same hand over the summer. It took me a solid hour and a half to just remove
them. I was angrier than a bull on a hot day.
“You good?” My brother asked.
“Oh, I think I'm just
fine,” I replied, “take the board I'm gonna go scream at myself for ten minutes
I will meet you back here.”
Sure enough it took about ten minutes
to remove it, so I went back out to the shed and my brother sure enough had
already set it up and was finished. He looked at me and told me that I'm
useless and always having problems with myself. But after he got done rumbling
he told me to go get him a 2x6 board. I waddled my way over to where I saw one
laying earlier, so I picked it up but the board was wet a little. The board
began to slide from my hands. I moved my hand to grab it firmly and felt a
small slit on my index finger... another splinter.
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