Dawn
“I’ve never seen a dawn as beautiful as this.” he stretches his arms toward the light, embracing the warmness, despite the fact that he never could wake up and see a dawn in his fifteen years of life.
“Am I blooding?” the young boy turns to his friend and points at his lips. His voice is shaking. Under little light reflected by the snow, there is no blood on his anxious face. “But it hurts” he speaks to himself, continuously touching and licking his lips. “Blooding” is a typical mistake made by a non-native speaker, but right now who will correct him anyway?
In his younger days, kids put their two fingers on the lips and breathed out while removing fingers. Then they started to show a satisfied face, pretending they were really smoking. Now he has no time of playing with vapor. He bends over to the front seat and looks for a jacket in his suitcase. The smell of fuel and burning plastic flows around him. He covers his nose with left hand and keeps looking. His eyes open widely, trying to adapt to the darkness. He cannot find his jacket. The blue jacket with a “Columbia” logo on top right. Apparently, he was on “vacation mode” when his mom helped him packing. The breeze flows through his shirt, and his legs are shaking like a jelly.
“Always send me a message of where you are and when you will come home.” It is the No. 1 and the only rule his mom has for him. He turns his phone back on and immediately sends her a message. “Safe trip, seat belts”. Her reply is simple. Too simple for the boy and now he is bored because the conversation doesn’t last long. The cab is warm, or maybe a little too hot. The air conditioner is the best invention of human history, he thinks before falling asleep.
Standing in the middle of the road with only a shirt is not a good decision. Well, the single shirt part is worse. The young boy figures he should wave to stop the upcoming cars. He also figures that he might be hit by the upcoming car. It is too dark, and the darkness is too long, he thinks. The anxiety on his face disappears. He calmly looks straight forward on the road until the ambulance comes.
“70 beats per minute, you seem very fine,” the man takes off the finger clip and the machine stops reading numbers.
I smiled.
“Sorry.” the boy is seriously apologizing to his mom for not taking to her warning. Although he is not hurt, her mother’s shouts make him very uncomfortable. “Perhaps mentioning the jacket part of the story will result in more shouts from her” he figures. So he focuses the conversation on the seat belt part. He feels guilty and happy at the same time. Her sharp shouts are now soft for him to understand.
He walks out the hospital and raises his head. The soft sunlight shines on his face. The long dark is over now, and he feels fully awakened and fresh. He is already excited for a new day.
I rewrote the first narrative piece I did for class. It is totally different from the first one although it’s the same story. I wrote in third person describing my own story and only reveals the fact at the end of the story when I wrote “I smiled”. I personally feel that this piece is a huge improvement from the Summer Was Over piece. It feels like a different dawn. The structure of this piece is non-linear, which means I intentionally changed the sequence of the story and rearranged it. Overall, this piece is my first try of non-linear and I feel confident about it. The improvment of story-telling techniques is also shown between lines.