English Language Arts: Making Inferences (TEKS.ELA.9-12.5.F) Practice Test

On Tuesday nights, when the press idled like an old truck in the back room, I proofed the front page beneath the humming neon. The refinery's flare, visible through my office window, burned a steady second sun over our bay town. That week, a line cook had slipped me a phone video—rainbow sheen drifting from the plant's outfall, mullet skipping past it as if the water stung. The ad rep had already sold the refinery a full-page congratulating the high school's playoff run; the check cleared before the team bus rumbled north.

I told myself it wasn't the video's blurriness that kept me from assigning the story. It was the way the grocery sponsored the band uniforms, the way the motel comped rooms for evacuation nights, the way my son's ag teacher kept extra feed sacks for families that needed them. People around here count favors like rainfall.

I filed a softer piece about the flare's "reliability" during cold snaps. I wrote it clean and neutral. Then I drove the long way home, past the boat ramp where nobody fishes anymore after dark, and watched the tide slide under the pier. The water didn't look dangerous. It only looked like it had learned to keep secrets.

Every evening after closing the shop, I carry a tin of oil to the back lot and tend the gate. Two swings, one latch. The hinges complain in a voice I know better than my own, a rusted vowel that held our yard together when Dad was alive and the storms came teasing the coastline. He used to say a gate is a promise: it should move when asked and hold firm when told. He left no will, only a drawer of receipts that smelled like salt, and a gate that sags when the wind turns east.

Neighbors have offered a new chain-link, something that won't remember our weather. I nod, thank them, return to the hinges. Oil darkens the metal delicately, as if the years could be convinced to behave. When I work the latch, the sound reaches the alley and back again. I imagine it traveling like a message that never quite lands, like the last voicemail from the night shift I never deleted. The shop's books agree we are solvent in the daylight. Night asks different questions, and the gate keeps answering them, back and forth, until I can lock up the quiet and go home without needing to turn on any lights.