Assignment
7
Author’s Note: Assignment 7 was relatively simple: write a really vivid setting. The lesson
corresponding to assignment 7 was all about using vivid imagery to convey
certain story elements and even provide movement in the plot.
Grade Received: A
Inferno
August
in the city. The blistering heat wave continued to have the metropolis in a
brutal stranglehold, as it had since it first wrapped its menacing hands
unforgivingly around the urban wasteland about a month earlier.
The
blinds in the apartment were drawn tightly, but the harsh orange light of the
waning afternoon sun still beat down mercilessly through the small, dingy
barred windows with the cracked panes. A small metal fan hummed noisily in the
background while Marianne sat rapt with attention.
While
it was so damned ungodly hot in the tiny apartment, it wasn’t the oppressive
heat that had Marianne so still and so breathless. It was her hulking brute of
a boyfriend, George.
He
snored powerfully, his breath heavy and sickening with copious amounts of
whiskey and rum, on the sagging, disgusting couch on the other side of the
dirty room. She hated, hated, hated him and was staring at him with an anger
hot enough to forge iron. But she didn’t dare move a muscle.
If
he’d opened his eyes and seen that she was gone, he’d surely hunt her down like
a hound dog on the trail of a fox—ceaselessly, unrelentingly, and to the ends
of the earth. And what he’d do to her once he finally got his rough,
gargantuan, dirty-nailed hands on her—well, Marianne didn’t dare bring the
horrifying thoughts to her consciousness. He’d already done so much so cruelly
and so viscously to her when she tried her hardest to be so compliant and
ingratiating to him.
But
now she didn’t give a damn. He would beat her anyway, his temper as firey as
the outside air, so she might as well give back all—and more than—she’d gotten
from the inebriate oaf over the years, she thought to herself as a bead of
sweat slid down her disfigured face.
Sweat
continued to trickle down Marianne’s face and back while George snored loudly.
He abruptly stopped snoring briefly to clear his phlegmatic throat but soon
fell back seamlessly into his alcoholic torpor. Marianne froze briefly when he
did that, but then continued to glare at him in fury and disgust when he
resumed his journey in the land of Nod. She silently drew in a deep breath, a
final act of rebellion against the sticky summer heat.
Don’t
wake up, she thought with bated breath as she delicately reached behind the
grimy wicker chair she was sitting in a pulled out a long, gleaming
machete.
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