English Language Arts: Plot Structure (TEKS.ELA.9-12.7.C) Practice Test

On the Blanco's limestone bank, Mateo sets the tin coffee cup on a smooth rock and listens for a sound that is not yet there. Cicadas grind the morning thin; the river, low as a kept secret, combs itself over gravel. The siren in town is tested on Wednesdays at nine, but his hands remember it before his ears do. He was twelve the first time the river climbed the sycamores. His father, soaked and laughing, had pressed a palm to the boy's crown and said, Hear how the stones move—then the brown water was crowded with fence posts, porch chairs, the bright guilt of a tricycle. In the wet months after, they found their photographs bloomed into unfamiliar faces. Now, decades and one grave later, Mateo cups the air and hears again the river's old language: the clack of cobbles rolling, the hollow drum behind the siren as if the sky had an empty stomach. He is not superstitious; he is fluent. He rises, pockets the cup, and starts up the path toward town before the horn begins. The dog lifts her head, puzzled at his certainty, as blue herons lift from the shallows like folded letters suddenly understood.

By the time Eliza noticed the hairline crack radiating from the mug's lip, the morning had already practiced its small betrayals. The hallway bulb hesitated before consenting to light; the front door inhaled and exhaled around its frame as though rehearsing a complaint. On the piano, a single D stuck a breath longer than the others, hardly enough to name, a burr you felt on your tongue more than heard. She set the mug down anyway, turned it so the fissure faced the wall, and slipped the silver key into her coat pocket. It had always been a snug fit, but today the metal nudged and balked at the lock as if unused to the angle of her hand. On the train she watched a boy press his thumb into a soft pear until the skin shone with the idea of breaking, then he stopped and ate an orange instead. She laughed because it was not a metaphor, not yet. On the street outside the hall, banners shook themselves awake. Eliza breathed in, and the winter air set a tick behind her ribs, a metronome she did not remember winding. She would be early. The door would yield. Her hands would remember everything.