Final Piece for my Writing Class

[SarahC]

I figured I would share this here. I have to turn it in tomorrow and read it aloud in my Creative Writing class. Thought some of you might like to read it.

Thanks

Sarah

 

 

“He Almost Killed Me Dead”

It was a typical, rainy and grey November day in 1999. I had been summoned to the main office of Soddy-Daisy Middle School for a mysterious early afternoon pick up. As I waited for my mother, I mulled over the reasons for my early departure.I fidgeted in the plastic waiting room chair. It wasn’t the dentist. I ran my tongue over the braces on my top teeth. It wasn’t a doctor’s appointment. I don’t feel sick. My mind began to drift away to the missed opportunities I’d have had in English class, when the office door’s hydraulic lock squeaked.

My mother stepped inside her black ankle length rain slicker flapping behind her in her rush. She signed the proper form and turned to me dead pan. “Stop playing with your tongue, that’s not ladylike, get in the car, let’s go now. We have to get your sister.” I got up, grabbed my book bag, and headed for our ragged white Ford Thunderbird. Mom unlocked my door. I put my book bag in the floorboard and squished it with my feet. Mom got in and I started fidgeting with the radio. “What’s this about?” I asked. “Are we going to the mall? To the movies? Is this a secret fun day?” Mom smacked my hand away from the radio. Her metallic yellow dyed hair was in her eyes, she adjusted the radio and then I noticed she looked tense. “I have a bad feeling about something,” she said and started the car.

The elementary school my sister went to was not very far from the middle school. Only a mile or two up the road. This time the ride felt endless. Mom usually listened to a drone of unbearable talk radio, but instead, today we road in silence. We pulled up to the Elementary school, and I started to pick at the grey upholstery on the side of the console. Mom ignored me and got of the care to fetch my sister. They returned in a couple minutes, and we started toward our house, which was just down the hill about a quarter mile from the elementary school. The trees and houses zoomed by as we picked up speed down the large hill. We rounded the sweeping curves, and as we were 3 houses away from our own I noticed a very large blackish figure in our loop around drive way. As we approached it, the figure became clear. It was a man. With a very large gun. “What the fuck?” my mother clenched the steering wheel in her fists with white knuckles. She slowed down to a stop beside the man. “What’s going on here,” she asked. The man looked down at her, “Keep moving ma’am”, he said and stared once again straight ahead across the road into the woods. “I will not keep moving! I live here!” My mother was getting angry. I prayed the man would not get angry too, and we’d end up full of bullet holes. “May I see your ID, ma’am” the man said. My mother rooted around in her purse and found her driver’s license. She handed it to the gun man, and he stared at it for a second, and seemed satisfied we actually lived here. He gave Mom her ID back, and we were instructed to pull into the driveway and wait.

Once parked, another man with a slightly larger gun approached my mother’s side of the car. Again she rolled down her window. “Ma’am, we’re with the Hamilton County Sheriff's Department, and the Soddy Police called us. There was an eyewitness report of an escaped convict in the area. Apparently, he tried to break in to your home. We’re going to have to ask you to remain in the car while our search team goes inside. May I have your house key?” Mom was silent. I looked at her, and she looked terrified. She turned the car off and handed the man her keys. It was then I noticed the huge black van parked in our neighbor’s driveway. The side door opened and out came 3 men dressed in identical black uniforms with heavy vest and head lamp helmets. The dogs they had were huge. Probably attack dogs. The man beside our car said the dogs were going to go in the house, as well as under the house. Because we lived in a prominent flood zone our house had to be built with a raised foundation about six feet off the ground. It was the perfect area for an escaped madman to camp out. I imagined a dirty man in orange coveralls with crazy eyes squatting underneath our house. He’d be picking his teeth with a large knife perfect for removing the fingers and toes of 12 and 8 year old girls. I hoped my sister wasn’t thinking the same thing. I turned around in the seat to see my sister in the backseat. She was looking at the men with the dogs coming closer. “Wow, Mom, look at those dogs!” The fact that there was possibly a criminal underneath our house did not seem to effect her. I wish I could have said the same. As I watched the group of men and search ascend our front steps I wished my dad were here. He had to travel a lot for his business, and was currently in Indiana, or Ohio, or somewhere not so interesting. It was like my mom read my mind, because she pulled out her cell phone and punched in a number. She put the phone to her ear and preceded to tell my dad about the men with the guns and the dogs and the guy that had escaped from jail. Mom explained that she’d had a weird feeling, and decided to come and get us out of school rather than letting us ride the bus. Almost as soon as she’d finished telling dad everything that had happened, the men with the dogs emerged from our home. The man beside our car said that once the dogs go under the house we’re free to go inside. I watched as the men disappeared behind our house. The man gave us the okay, and we quickly went from the car into the house.

***************

A little while later, after the men and the dogs had gone and our house had been deemed “convict free” my mother yelled up to me. “Sarah! Come down stairs!”

I yelled back from my sister’s room, “Why?” and then decided to not be difficult and go downstairs. Mom was waiting for me at the bottom of the stair, and she told me that there were news reporters outside. She said they wanted to talk to us about the escapee, and his attempted break in to our house. I asked if they had caught him, fearful that any moment the crazy eyed convict would bust down the door and knife us all to pulp.

She told me not to make an ass of myself and to talk to the news men. Mom opened our door, and we were greeted by none other than the spray tanned, sparkly white toothed, flannel suit wearing Don Welch. He reeked of cologne, and every word he said had an unusual upward flare that the end. The news media being in Soddy seemed almost unheard of to me, let alone on my front porch. I immediately resented the fact that they were there, and they were trying to exploit the fact that we were almost murder victims.

Don turned his attention to my mom, and asked her to step around in front of the camera. She did as instructed and for the next 5 minutes Don asked my mom a ton of questions, most notably, “What made you decide to pick up your two daughters from their schools early?” My mother answered his question with an elegant honest poise I had never seen from her before, and never really saw again. “Well,” she said, looking past his toothy smile and fake tan, her eyes catching mine. “I guess you’d call it a mother’s intuition. I had this funny feeling, and I didn’t want Sarah to walk home from the bus stop. I knew something bad could happen. A mother will do anything to protect her children, and this is how, today, I chose to protect mine.” Don seemed to not notice her well spoken answer, instead he turned his teeth and orange wrinkles to me. “Okay, Sharon, it’s your turn, can you tell us how you felt knowing a bad man tried to break into your house?” His patronizing tone set me off, and I just wanted to go back inside and ignore the whole thing.

Instead, I took my mother’s place in front of the camera. Don repeated his question, and I contemplated and answer. Quickly, I decided to play the hick role. A role my dad would be proud of. “My name is Sarah. Well, Dawn,” I said, clearly emphasizing every vowel and syllable as much as I could. “I was scared, I mean, seriously, dude? I could have had my head chopped off. I could have died, dude! He could have killed me dead!” Satisfied with my acting skills, I walked past the camera man and my mother looked mortified.

The news men asked my mother if they could get some exterior shots of our house and the woods across the road. She said that would be fine. I felt like telling them that they could take posterior shots as they got off my damn porch. I glared at the reporter in his flannel suit. Mom asked when the segment would air, and was told probably between 5:30 and 6:30. She thanked the men and we walked inside.

***************

When the news segment aired I was surprised at how my mom and I looked on the television. Mom’s hair seemed darker, and her face more tan and plump than it usually looked. Although she was not born in the south, I could detect a little bit of southern flare in her words. When her portion of the interview was over, the television cut back to the news room. The reporter behind the desk said something to the effect of “Sue Ann Chastain’s daughter Sarah had a more spirited reaction.” and there I was. My heavy rimmed glasses barely gripping my tiny nose, and may has well have been on my chin. My hair was a mountain of frizz and disheveled, almost reaching afro-like status. As I began to speak, my thick put-on Southern accent grated at my ears and I was embarrassed at how I showed my ass. I could feel the shame crawl from my toes up my body and into my ears. What if my classmates saw this? What would my papaw think? I immediately regretted showing my ass, regardless of how pissed off the news reporter made me. All these thoughts whirled inside of my head, and I began to feel dizzy. I wished now, that the convict had gotten ahold of me. Surely that would be better than the shame I’d face at school tomorrow which was guaranteed to kill me dead on the spot.