“When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature.”
The plot in this short story was better developed as you have a few extreme moments of tension and anxiety with the character. Not only does he lose the keys to the car, but they mistake a stranger for their friend, get the butts kicked, bring him down with a tire iron, then get close to raping this stranger’s date; he then proceeds to hide in a lake and come face-to-face with a dead man floating in the lake. I was wondering at that moment if the girl and her rescuers would find him in the lake next to this dead man and assume that he was the murderer. This character was very lucky to have gotten away innocently!
The passage for me created a turning point in the story…a calm after the storm sort of speak. After all the chaos from that night had ended, the main character was left with nature to go onward with the following day and try to repair what was broken, literally and figuratively. He found his other friends in the woods, then they found the car and the keys. Suddenly they were approached with one more temptation of a beautiful, yet stoned woman offering to do drugs with them. She was also possibly looking for the man who owned the motorcycle parked in the lot, the man who may have been the one floating dead in the lake. Luckily, the guys got smart and knew that they needed to get out of there fast and start their lives over again.
