“You’ve got a college degree? What are you doing here?” I hear recited behind me from a very familiar voice. The deep tone and little bit of rasp in it, I turned around and out of nowhere he appeared. John, my old classmate that dropped out halfway through freshman year to work around the system. He joined the “family business” .
I met John on the first day of admissions and from there we were in a lot of classes together. Now this makes sense because your freshman year everything was centered around the base classes and nothing else. You had people majoring in medical sciences all the way to people majoring in accounting, but I wasn’t majoring in any of those., I was in homeland security.
At that point nobody knew what the person next to them was planning for the future and next to me was John. For the first half of the semester we got close and one day he just vanished. I went on to get my degree and started taking cases. For the first couple years I never ran into anyone I knew. Then, on October, 27 in 2018 everything changed, I heard a familiar voice muttering behind me and there he was.
“John,” I stuttered, ”long time no see.”
As he looks at me very confused you can see the spark hit him and everything clicked. John looked very different, a lot skinnier and way more tattoos. He showed me around even though he didn’t know what I was there for. He showed me all his ways of crime and by the time he finally asked what I’m doing there it was too late. I had too much evidence.
January 7, 2025 at 8:36 am
I enjoyed reading this story, because there was a sense of dramatic irony when John was showing you all of the crimes he’s done, while he doesn’t know that you’re in the Department of Homeland Security. Another aspect of the story I liked was the auditory imagery in the first paragraph, when you explain the sound of John’s voice as a “deep tone with a little bit of rasp in it.” Using this type of auditory imagery, to me, helped depict what John might’ve looked like, and what he might’ve been like, as his voice was raspy and deep, so he was likely a large man who has been through some troubles in his life.
January 7, 2025 at 12:03 pm
I feel like this was a very different approach to the other street snippets but it was good. The explanation of their voices was creative too.