The Blogfest of Death!

Today's blogfest is... The Blogfest of Death! Hosted by Tessa's Blurb. Be sure to go read the other entries which I'm sure are wonderful! I'm going to do my best to get around to everyone's entries, but there are a lot so it might take a little bit.

My entry on this lovely Sunday is from a work that took me several years to write and still, after many plot revisions, topped out at 28,000 words (yikes! too short!). I still like it, but it was truly most important for learning purposes. However, someone dies in it! Woohoo! Okay, not really happy, but for the purposes of this blogfest it is. And to correct myself, the death actually occurs before this scene. ( I hope that isn't against the rules...)

So here you go! I hope you enjoy...

Ruth may have been informed of where they were going, but the moment she saw her brother’s red pick-up truck in the middle of an intersection smashed against another car, surrounded by debris, truth began to register, and she forgot about everything else.

A wreck had indeed happened, and that was Robert’s truck.

A tow truck was beginning to load the vehicles, and Ruth stared at the seat in front of her, hoping Robert’s truck was totaled and going directly to a junk yard. She didn’t think her stomach, or her heart, could handle seeing it a second time.

The police officer was speaking, but Ruth didn’t hear much. Her parents nodded along like obedient students, but when Ruth leaned over to her mother beside her and, whispering, asked where they were going, her mother responded with a shrug and tears.

Eventually Ruth saw the hospital further down the street and began to understand. They must need identification. Maybe we are saying goodbye.

Tears still hadn’t formed. The irreversible reality was gradually settling in Ruth’s crowded mind—but the grief hadn’t sunk in. She sat more in bewilderment than in a state of hysterics.

She had also forgotten that Jake was in her class when she was called to the office, and he was probably wondering what was going on. So when she saw his name on her ringing phone she ignored it, having little desire to speak to him about anything as huge as this.

A minute later, ten minutes later—she wasn’t sure about time anymore—her family was walking through the hospital doors and Sam was running toward Ruth—enveloping her in a hug.

And she cried.

Cried for her brother whom she’d never see again.

Cried because she was so much happier to see Sam than she would have been to see Jake.

And she cried because as Sam was holding her he was whispering, “It’s going to be okay. God has a good reason for this. Give Him time to explain,” and suddenly she no longer knew what she believed.

Ruth had always been a staunch supporter of “everything happens for a reason.” Every world catastrophe she was able to pass off as there being some greater reason she just wasn’t privileged to. Even her parents’ divorce—as abrupt and unexplained as it was—was reasoned in Ruth’s mind as for the better in some way, at some point in time.


It was how Ruth dealt with everything. But suddenly, when real catastrophe had struck her—not people in other countries or people she had never met—it all seemed like such crap. How would anything really be better without her brother?


Through her tears she glanced around the emergency room, looking for other people crying. Her eyes fell upon a mother and her young son, running alongside an entering stretcher. All Ruth could see was blood, but her mind saw the man as someone to blame. He was the driver, she decided, even though he may have come in from the other side of town.


Had Sam’s arms not been around her; had Ruth not felt, for just a moment, so safe and at peace, she would have chased after him.