Cyclone

This is just a draft for my grade ten writing class.  It is unfinished, so feel free to cratique as you wish, and help me make it better.  Just make sure to post your ideas in the coment section below, and, as always, don't use content from this website without my permition.  Don't take any of the information below as being anyways valid.  It is my own creation and purely fictional, so don't try to go and use it for any social studies projects, unless you want an atomatic F that is...

  The sound that my rubber sholed shoes make as I pace the polished floors of Newark international airport, echoes the emptiness of the halls and extends to the high sealings above.  As I pace, I watch as a custodian dunks the feathered end of his broom into the bucket, rings it out, and slops it against the already spotless floor.  I smell the drifting aroma of a nearby “starbuck’s” and hear the brewing of coffee machines busy at work; Puffing and wheezing “mocha delight.”  I can hear jet engines revving and taking off in the distance, their sounds ever so slightly penetrating the steel-mesh walls of terminal C.

As I make my way towards the seating area, a million thoughts go running through my head.  “Where has he been, what does he look like now, does he speak any English, Would he know who I am?” I straighten my tie, and fix a ruffle in my suit before taking a seat next to others, who too look like they are waiting for the return home of their loved ones.  I take a quick glace to my left and notice the blinking lights of the airports plane flight schedule billboard, several are behind.  I scower the list looking at the flights.  Malaysia, Mongolia, Moscow, no, I’m still in the clear.  Then my eyes meet with one of the yellow flashing bars, the kind you don’t want to see.  The text overlaying it reads “Madagascar, Flight_127: Delayed one hour due to poor weather conditions.” I hang my head in disbelief/ discontent/ disappointment and sigh.  I have already been waiting here for ten hours, how much longer will it take before I begin to lose my sanity in the midst of this crowd?

I run my mud-brown fingers through my charcoal-back hair and wipe some sweat from my brow.  Tension is building inside me. I lift my head to look at a clock “3:32am.”

A mother in the chair adjacent to mine begins to hush her small child to sleep.  I become distracted and hypnotized by her rocking, swaying him from side to side in her arms (as much rocking as the steel-framed seats will allow).  She holds him clinging to her chest, his small, bald head resting peacefully on her shoulder.  She begins to hum and sing a song so smooth it would melt your heart.  She keeps swaying in tempo of the melody, leaning one way and then the other… and soon all the congestion of the airport slips away.  All is quiet. 

Memories from the past begin to flood into my mind; Clouding my head, cluttering my every thought.  I drift in the darkness of it all; becoming more and more lost, in a deep sea of thought. 

…

In the solitude of my mind, I began to think about how things used to be, not so long ago.  How the mid-day’s sun would beat upon my head from above, and how the feeling of savanna grass felt as it ran between my toes, and beneath me feet.  How my family was so poor, that we would do anything for a buck.  How we would go several days without food, just for the sake of not having enough to eat.  We had nothing, but somehow, we lost it all…

“Why are you doing that?” I asked my father.  He was piling sand-filled bags from and old wooden ladder upon the steel roof of our house, an eight foot high shack of a place we called home. 

“It’s so that it won’t blow away” my father said with an unnerving sigh.  He hated having to explain such things to younger children.  He could never seem to frame things in the right words that I could understand. 

“Our roof’s going to blow away?!” I said in a both shocked and surprised voice.

“Not if I don’t find something to hold it down in place” he said while carefully placing a bag upon the front left corner, facing the south. 

I began poking at the ground with me feet, something I always do when I’m nervice.

“Are we going to be blown away too, Papa?” I asked with in a concerned tone of voice.  My father just looked at me from above with knotted eyes, as though searching for something to say.  There was a brief pause for a moment before my father turned and continued on with his work. 

“It’s not good for you to ask so many questions” my father said.  I had the feeling he wanted me out of his hair; he did not want me to become worried.  “Why don’t you go see if your mother needs any help with the gardening, okay?” I knew he was only baiting me on, something he did often, but I took it anyway. 

When I arrived at the garden, my mother was bent over pulling carrots out of the nurturance-deprived soil. 

“…” she said cheerfully. “Did you come to help Mama with the garden?  Here, give me a hand by picking some beans.” 

I weaved my way through the garden until I got to the drill where the beans were.  They didn’t appear to be by any means edible.  They were dried, shriveled and hard to the touch.  I reached out and felt the wrinkly, black skin of one as it broke away in my hand. 

“Are you sure we can eat these, Mama?” I said, holding the withered bean in my hand.  For a moment, my mother look worried, but then she only looked at me and smiled. 

“I don’t suppose we should.”  She tried to remain optimistic with everything she went to do.  That’s what gave her the strength to keep going, even when the times were tough. 

Our region of Madagascar was suffering from a terrible drought at that time, and hadn’t see rain for two long months.  Everything was dry, drier than it had ever been before.  Trees were splitting and cracking down their spines, their leaves turning grey and dying out.  Areas where the soil was usually moist, went dry and turned into sand.  The hot, humid air stayed unusually still, but when it blew, it whipped-up dust.  There had already been warnings for tornados and dust devils over the past few days, but so far we’ve been lucky. 

My eyes darted from row to row, plant to plant.  None of them seemed fertile or anyways good to eat.  All of them were turning brown, dried, burnt by the rays of the sun.  I lifted my head to find my mother picking away, still trying to judge which vegetables we would actually be able to swallow.  There was a hint of uncertainty in her eyes, as she struggled to find food.  But with every leaf she turned over, her hopes sank further into despair.   She bit her lip and rose from the ground, put her hands on her hips and shook her head in disbelief.  She looked as though she were about to burst into tears.  Four carrots and an onion, were all that she held in her hands. 

She was so worked-up over her loss in crop that she didn’t even notice me when I drew near.  I tugged on her dress and asked “What’s wrong, Mama?”

Startled, she jumped and almost dropped the vegetables she had worked so hard in collecting.  She then gathered herself, and knelt down beside me.   “You needn’t worry about a thing, …  Families are stronger as long as they have each other to lean on.” 

“But what about the garden?” I said.  My lower lip was quivering.

“We still have plenty of wheat and barley in the grain box to pull us through the winter.  We’ll find ways, the same as we always do.” She sounded so calm and reassuring, even though her face was saying something else. 

Tears were streaming down my face, their bitter saltiness entering into my mouth.  I couldn’t hold what was building inside of me any logger.  I was undone. 

“Why, do we always have to live this way?  Why is there never enough food for anyone?  I just want to live a normal life, one where no one starves and everyone is happy.” 

“Shhh… there, there honey, it’ll be alright.” My mother held me to her chest, squoas me tightly, and patted me on the back.  “I wish it were that easy, but it’s out of my control.”

She just stood there in the garden,

Start with the scene where the cyclone hits.  *groping around in the darkness of the ten by twelve room.   *Children that young should never need to know death, but after the previous night’s advents, my brother new all too well…

When I awoke next, the rain was pounding furiously against the side of the little shack of a house that we called home.  In the distance, I could hear the sound of trees cracking and swaying in the wind, one fell just to the right of our home, toppling several of the trees next to it, including the one that we used to tether our close line to.  It snapped as the weight of the fallen trees showed to be too much for it to handle, and thus pulled away the boards that anchored it to the house in one swift rip.  Our mother hurried us away from the crumbling wall, and ordered us to take refuge in our grain box, though when we lifted the lid there was only room for two.  Our mother, doing what any good, loving mother would do, gave the two spaces left in the box for me and my brother. 

As we climbed in, tears filled her eyes; we knew not what was to come of her next, we were far too young to understand.  She hugged and embraced us in her arms, and gave us kisses upon our foreheads.  She said to us Tiaka ianao “I love you,” and told us goodbye, before slowly closing the top of the lid of the box.              

Through the crack of where the where the “lid met the base”, I could see my mother… / I still remember my mother’s last expression she had on her face as I peered through the slit at the top of the box where the “lid met the base.” …

We stood there starring towards the horizon, waiting for our father’s return.  Three days past, …

*Remove from here on?

Then on the third day, a figure of a man came down the dirt-road that came from the forest and led to our house.  I thought to myself, “could it be? ..Father?!”   …

As the strange man, who I had never seen before approached us, I noticed that he was not like the other people of the village.  He had a lighter complexion, and spoke to us in a different tongue.  We were normally shy little boys, as our parents had always discouraged us from talking with strangers of any kind, but this time was an exception. 

“Where’s Father!” my brother demanded, as though this man had anything to do with the absence of my father.  “Where is he!”

My brother broke into tears, this was all too much for him.