Stranded By: Luke Simmons

I was startled awake by the immense claps of thunder that shook the mountain that I once thought immovable. I grasped my now tattered suitcase and ripped out a shirt to use as a makeshift blanket to pull over my head as I shivered in fear. Despite the shield of the shirt over my face, I still saw the sharp outline of lightning that shattered the pure black sky. I crawled as far away from the opening of the cave as possible until my bare back pressed against the cool wall. I hugged my knees to my chest, whimpering, until I drifted off into a restless sleep.

...

I awoke as the sun slipped along the wet cave floors to kissed my face. The shirt that I had desperately stretched around me in a false sense of safety was now stuck to my soaked skin. I sat up and slowly started to dig through my suitcase as my eyes started to put everything in focus. The sight of crumpled food wrappers made my stomach rumble like an earthquake.
What made it even worse was there was not one more scrap of food among the once full granola bar wrappers and chip bags.
It had been two weeks since the plane crashed, and I was the only survivor. Well, survivor was a stretch, appearing as my body was ripping itself apart down to skin and bone in a desperate attempt at survival. I had stretched the meek amount of food from the ruins of the plane over the longest two weeks of my life, but now my stomach was cursing me out as the realization that I had no food left at all hit me.
I had been on a flight to Los Angeles to start my first semester at the University of California, and had felt excited out of my mind. My stomach twisted and I felt a tear roll down my face as I found the remains of my school supplies and dorm decorations inside of the suitcase. Just to make it worse I also found a picture of me with my whole family, who I might never see again.
"Stop it!" I yelled as I burst from the ground. "You know that sitting here doing nothing won't help anything, you have to do something. But what to do, what to do..." My words drifted off and realized how after only three weeks I had started talking to myself. I knew that sitting in that wretched cave was not going to help anything, and I had to do something. Anything.
Without thinking, I found my legs carrying me out of the cave and onto the beach to look around. My knees and ankles shook and felt like wet cardboard. My eyes squinted to slits as I held my hand to block the bright sun from my eyes.
Then at once my eyes widened as I staggered backwards and fell into the sand.
I scrambled to use a piece of driftwood to help me stand up straight without falling, and scanned the treeline again to see if my desperate self was deceiving me. Yet it wasn't.
In the distance I saw something that gave me hope so intense my body seemed to gain the strength of a giant. I dropped the wood that was keeping me upright as my ankles started feverishly shaking.
My eyes squinted, my hands squeezed into fists, and my legs started to push me forward. I headed towards that hope with all of my might, and my legs somehow found the what seemed impossible will to run.