Mrs. Nash's Mind-Personal Narrative

I couldn’t quite place the look on Mrs. Nash’s face when we came in from lunch and filled our little desks. Her lips were turned down, her eyes cast off to the side, distracted from whoever’s spelling test she was grading. For such a focused, get-it-done kind of teacher, it was strange to see her that way, to say the least. “I was listening to the police scanner in the office,” she confided to us. “There was a big car accident right in town… I hope the people are all right. They had to stop traffic on the main road.”
That was surprising; there are hardly ever big accidents in our small town. If it was on the main road, my bus will probably have to take the long route. Grreeaat. Of course I was also sad to hear the news! Just… sad like when you see an …show more content…
I wiped my eyes and continued to listen. We talked for a short while longer, myself only interrupting to ask a short question here and there. Then she showed me the car. It was surrounded by scrap and garbage, probably already in a lot who-knows-where, and I didn’t even bother to ask who took the picture. Mom’s red jeep, that we had for almost as long as I could remember, had been reduced to a crushed tin can. Every door and exposed surface had been dented inward, scratched, and scraped free of red paint. The windshield and both front windows were shattered, spider-webbing into thousands of pieces that were falling out one by one. At that moment, my last shred of restraint broke away, shattered like the windshield, and I flung my arms around her. The simple fact that I had been restricting from entering the open air of my consciousness struck me, forcefully reaffirmed by the bruises on her body and that horrible image of her car. She could have died. I could have lost her that day. So suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, just gone. “Baby,” she laughed one of her sweet sad laughs, “that