Writing Prompts: Accident


#10 Accident

Write a story about an accident you caused or an accident that happened to you.  This could be negative as in a car accident or maybe it’s an accident of good fortune.  Describe how the accident occurred, who was involved and how it ended.  Was it a bicycle accident?  How did it happen?  Did someone get hurt?

When I was fourteen, my family had decided to go to a place that we went to every year called R-Ranch. To give a bit of background, I lived with my biological father and stepmom at the time. This trip was with my mom, my other dad, my brother, Stephen, and my sister, Sarah. My other dad and my mom were trying to work things out after having been separated for many years.

The entire trip was a comical disaster. My dad drove our truck into a ditch. There was no air conditioning. Everybody was overall just grumpy and hot. This was also the beginning of the end of the reconciliation of our parents, but that’s another story.

One night, Stephen, Mom, and Hugh (other dad) decided to go fishing. Sarah and I really were not feeling like going fishing at all. We both found the thought of fishing boring and uninteresting. I also found fish very creepy looking. I still do in a way. They accepted that we didn’t want to go and left without problem.

Everything was fine for a few hours. She was entertaining herself with making up a story narrative out loud with her dolls. I was reading. It was spring break for all of us. I didn’t really have many friends. My dad and stepmom were super strict and I wasn’t really allowed to do much of anything outside of school. So I liked reading a lot during my free time.

After awhile, Sarah started getting bored. I wanted to keep reading, but she was getting grumpy and agitated. She was regretting her decision to stay behind. I decided we could go out and try to find them on the lake. It was dark by this point, so I had my doubts, but if it made Sarah happy, so be it.

We made our way down to the lake. I was making jokes and distracting Sarah. She was autistic and had some other issues that we weren’t too sure about at the time. She was nine at the time. One of the issues is she was squeamish of being around people she didn’t know. Especially at night. So I tried to keep her occupied as much as I could.

We got to the dock and found two nice paddle boats. I got my sister settled into one and started to step down into it myself. Instead of successfully getting into the boat like I hoped, I wound up falling into the lake. I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. I panicked because I’ve never been a great swimmer and it was dark. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the boat started drifting away which made Sarah panic because she didn’t know how to paddle the boat.

Luckily, there were two boys at the dock fishing who saw the whole thing. They helped me out of the lake. One boy got into the other paddle boat and went and retrieved my sister who had wound up getting very far out into the lake. It was so embarrassing at the time. I mean I was fourteen and there were cute boys near by. Do I need to say more?

Once Sarah was retrieved from the boat, she was completely out of the notion to go find our parents and Stephen. So we went back to the cabin. I changed into pajamas and went back to reading. Sarah decided to change into her pajamas as well.

They came back an hour or two later and asked us how it went while they were gone. We told them it was fine and after hearing about their tales in fishing land, everybody went to bed. My sister and I didn’t specifically make a pact not to talk about the event. It just never got brought up until years later when somebody in the family was encouraging us to try out the paddle boats they had at the lake.

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