With each stride I managed to convince my body to take, the thermometer around me jumped a few degrees higher as if ridiculing me for deciding to continue on. The occasion warm spring breeze was temporarily alleviating, but my system continued consuming energy and releasing heat as if I were a steamboat, constantly burning away coal. My heavy feet began weighing me down, and when they came in contact with the firm packed dirt, fragile twigs and leaves that were by chance in my path, snapped and disintegrated underneath the soles of my worn down shoes. Rows of orange trees were nearby and each time I passed by, I caught a waft of the sweet scent of jasmine secreting from the early blooming flowers after the harsh chilly winter.

A faint outline of my brother’s baggy red and white shorts and overgrown black mushroom cap hair were bouncing up and down, correlating with his pumping arms and legs. He was one hundred feet ahead of me- “Beep beep!” “Beep beep!” “Beep beep!” my watch chirped to advise me that thirty minutes had passed and it was time to head back.

“Erick, come over here, it’s my turn to beat you home,” I jokingly hollered at him. I chuckled to myself because I knew he would eventually catch up to me.

The densely gathered orange trees were becoming more dispersed, signaling that we were close to exiting the orange groves. Once the hard packed dirt converged to pavement, I decreased my pace because we would need to stop and halt for traffic ahead. We were catching our breaths when a red worn down Honda with a large dent gashed on its side, stopped. The woman inside saw us waiting to cross and raised her hand, gesturing for us to pass. We were near home so I sprinted ahead, and my brother trotted behind- “Vroom!” The engine revved to life and in seconds the little air I had recuperated in my lungs from earlier was gone in a matter of a snap. The impact from the iron bumper and the six thousand pound car traveling at 25 miles per hour hit me on the side, sending pain signals navigating through my nerve system from my femur, climbing up my spinal column and brain stem and finally entering my brain; advising me of a jarring pain in my upper leg.

“Agghh,” my scream of anguish echoed through the air. I was thrown toward the rocky pavement, warmed by the early sun rays that began to peek over the heads’ of the mountains. I brought my arm out to slow the impact, but the skin from my elbow and forearm wa teared away by the gripping hands of the pavement. An unpleasant burning prickly irritation was piled atop my brain, but in the background, I heard the car motor coughing away from its problems. Warm tears began to trickle down my face, “Hold it in,” I told myself, trying to convince my mind that everything was fine. The tears escaped me in a downpour and the pain from my femur became unbearable and sharp, as if a scalpel inside me were cutting away muscle tissue.

“Samantha, stay up, help will arrive soon,” my brother shouted in a tone of concern. I could barely decipher what he was telling me. My eyelids began to droop and soon darkness enveloped as my system clicked on emergency shutdown.

I lifted my eyes and bright luminescent rays from the ceiling lights above was all they could perceive. I flinched away and fluttered my eyes to to get accustomed to my unknown surrounding. My head was groggy and resting on a pillow so soft, my head sunk into it like quicksand. I scanned around the area and in the corner of my eye, I saw a fluorescent pink. My left leg was encased in a cast with a hot pink bandage around the circumference of the cast. “When did I ever get a cast?” I thought to myself.

“Look, she’s awake,” my mom delightfully shrieked. Before I knew it, there was an entanglement of loving arms wrapped around me- that’s when I got a glimpse of what had happened. The malevolent woman’s car was coughing away, spreading its sickliness to me.