English Language Arts: Figurative Language (TEKS.ELA.9-12.9.D) Practice Test

The highway crosses the panhandle like a question drawn long across a dry chalkboard. Mesquite shrubs hunker as if guarding small fires, and windmills spell their slow alphabet to the restless sky. Out in the pasture, pumpjacks bow and rise, tireless parishioners nodding through a sermon no one remembers writing. Heat lifts from the asphalt in wavering hymns; a hawk stitches the distance with thread pulled from the sun. At the gas station, dust greets everyone by name, familiar as kin both welcomed and endured. Somewhere a storm is shouldering up its dark cattle, and the barbed wire hums the law of the land: take what you need, then live with the echo. The horizon is a straight-backed jury, unsmiling, patient. I drive until the odometer forgets how to count and, in the rearview, the land waves not goodbye, but a vow—to outlast whatever story we try to make of it.

Time threads a needle through the day and pulls me through, a seam I don't remember asking for sewn close to my skin. My calendar is a museum where the docents—those polite, officious shadows—usher me past empty frames and insist I admire what used to hang there. Letters arrive from rooms I haven't entered, their envelopes warm as if someone kept them beneath a sleeve. Even the kettle refuses to boil until I confess to the steam what I left undone. At the window, minutes line up like patient birds on a wire, waiting for the storm I promised them. When it breaks, it's only a teacup weather system, rain rehearsed in miniature across the saucer. I sip and nod. The thunder is my own name spoken from a distance I chose, the way an echo sometimes becomes a map you follow back to the locked door you made.