A Most Frustrating Moment

The pumpkin was dead, its body mangled and malformed. Orange black swirls of color streaked down reddened cheek skin in a mixture of saline and frustration. Was there something I had forgotten to turn in, something my teacher hadn’t recorded? Inwardly, I knew that it wasn’t so. I had just screwed up. Bad.
So confused. My anger was trapped up inside me, dealing a respectable migraine and aggravating twitching in my right eye. Emotions pursued exit routes, but my mind was as inescapable as the future that lay ahead. Suffering to come had not yet fully registered in my mind. A ghostly reflection of my own face on the blank computer screen rebounded the horror that I felt, its black, sightless eyes burrowing deep in my scarred and damaged mind. My own body that I knew so well looked unfamiliar in the sinister manifestation.
The twitch progressed until I couldn’t see out of my right eye. What had happened to me? The straight A suck-up from elementary school? I was no good in sports. Art, singing. Dancing or music. I felt as if God had thrown me into a dam of hardening concrete and told me to swim. I couldn’t even talk right. I was a forked twig in an endless river, watching dream after dream slip from my incapable grip, yet somehow remaining forever hopeful. I felt as if those humbling hopes had now been crushed, leaving me nothing but sorrow. I would have to start anew, begin from a pothole deeper and as burning as the depths of hell. For the first time in my life, I prayed for the days to come.

I was changed that day last year

(The pumpkin line refers to a date in October. I thought I might explain that this is an excerpt from an earlier story.)