Narrative Essay
... did too, and that’s when he started drinking. Anyways, on a particular day a couple of months ago, I was prying through my dad’s old photo album when I came across something that opened some doors to why my dad was the way he was. It was an aged picture of my dad’s father, Shane Easton, in an army uniform. I had never met him, but whenever I asked my parents about him, they disbelievingly dismissed his existence by merely saying that he had died long ago, failing to mention exactly where and when. I was constantly left confused and curious, but upon entering my teen years, I simply forgot I even had a grandfather, that is until that day when I discovered the photo. I decided to take the print, I don’t know why exactly, but I felt drawn to the young, unknowing man staring back at me through the black and white snapshot. It was two days later, July 1st, when the sound of unbearable screams echoed throughout my dad’s abandoned house. As the cries reached louder, unbearable volumes, my usually calm self began to panic, not knowing what was going on. (I mean, I always thought that my house was haunted when I was a little kid, but honestly!) But however scared I was, I decided to check upstairs to see if there was anyone else in the house besides me. While I climbed the stairs to my room, I realized that that was the source of all the pandemonium and chaos. As I hesitantly pushed open my door, I was unexpectedly pulled my some invisible force to the center of the room where some kind of portal was rapidly spinning through the floor. The next thing I knew, everything had gone entirely black. July 1st, 1916; Battle Of Somme, France. Guns. Screams. Heavy footsteps scrambling over hardened earth. What’s going on? I wondered, as I finally pried my weighty eyelids open. Everything around me was in utter mayhem: men in soldier uniforms tearing around what looked like a battlefield, opponents blazing gunfire at enemy lines, the gun swept land plastered with lifeless, young men, bleeding red, feeding the thirsty earth. I was instantly terrified and since I was practically in the middle of this combat, there was a good chance that I was going to be hit. But something was different: even though I was in the middle of everything, no one, not one soldier, seemed to be aware that I was even there, which was virtually impossible because I was only standing like three feet from one warrior in particular. He was only around my age, and even resembled me in a slight way. Then it struck me: the man, standing only a few feet away with a huge machine gun locked between his arms, was the same man that stared back at me through the black and white photo. It was my grandfather. Suddenly, without warning, there was a faint whistle and my grandfather went down. I noticed a small gash just above his chest, bleeding freely. His youthful face had a ghastly stare fixed upon it and his green eyes were blank and wide open, gazing into the distance. He was dead. So, there I was, standing alone on the battlefield, with hundreds of dead or badly wounded men surrounding me, my grandfather one of them. I glanced around me at the other soldiers; the injured crying out to help that would never come. To the right of me, I saw an exposed tree, its t...