We were sitting in my balcony on the fifth floor talking and looking at the sky enjoying the view. The sun starting to go down. It was blazing different shades of orange, red, and yellow. It was very beautiful and peaceful you could feel the caress of the breeze. “I can’t believe we got so dark. We were complaining about how we didn’t have a tan yet and now we’re so burnt.” my cousin Rosa says to me. “Yeah that’s what we get for not putting on sun block and staying at the beach 7 hours straight. All I had wanted to do was go in the water and get a little tan now my back is killing me.” I replied back. Thinking to myself how dumb and silly we are for actually staying that long at the beach doing nothing but laying down on the sand and get cooked by the sun.
I got up from my seat and went to the kitchen to get some food my mom had made barbeque earlier. I came back with two plates full of my favorite foods. I had grabbed 2 hot dogs, 2 burgers, 2 pieces of steak and some ceasar salad. I gave one plate to my cousin. We started eating hungrily our food. Then my mom comes with our drinks at the same time we heard the phone ring. My mom answers it and she called out “Jennifer it’s Ray calling you”. I put the food on the table and thought to myself why on earth is Melissa’s brother calling my house. He doesn’t even talk to me in person but he’s calling my house. He’s so shy but at the same time so mean to me. I began to worry and grabbed the phone from my mom and said “Hello” and I heard Ray’s deep manly voice on the other end of the line. His voice was so deep that I barely understood what he was saying. He said “Jennifer, Melissa and my mom just died…” I must have looked so shocked and pale that Rosa looked at me weird and whispered “what’s wrong?”. I asked Ray “What do mean? Are you playing some sick joke on me? Why would you say that about your sister?! I was hoping and praying he would say “Sike!” but I could hear how serious his voice sounded. He said “I wish I was. They died this afternoon. They had gone shopping and a building collapsed on top of them. They died instantly.” Oh my god I can’t believe it. I just spoke to her yesterday. She sounded so happy. I can’t believe it.” He said “I called you to let you know because I know you were her best friend. I have to be with my dad right now.” and with that he hung up the phone. I was in shock my cousin was asking me what wrong but I tuned her out. I couldn’t believe my best friend was gone with her mom. I had just lost my one true friend. We were just about to start a new chapter in our lives. We were going to go to high school together. In the background I heard my mother calling out my name. She was telling me to look at the TV. It was showing on the news that in our hometown a mother and her daughter were killed when they were hit by 100-pound blocks of concrete. My mother and my cousin immediately started crying and I just stared blankly at the TV. I knew my life had changed from the moment on.
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A great deal of potential,and I feel the panic and stricken moment of the phone call quite clearly. I do find that these moments of hearing about a loved one's death are perhaps the toughest for a writer to write, because on the one hand the emotion is high and the detachment low, and on the other there is in fact relatively little action for the writer to describe: holding a phone and standing in shock are about all that there is. And in fact, I find, people even seem to say the same things in these scenes, like 'they died instantly.' It's an interesting problem for a writer, that so many of the most important moments of our lives are so incredibly difficult to make fresh for a reader. But if they've ever been through it, then it works quite well.
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