Essay 1: Midnight Ride

This essay sample focuses on the stories (imaginative essay) in the section B of the English SPM 1119 paper. You can use this story to fit the question or carefully tweak the type of characters or the storyline to cater to the needs of the question (I thought that was rather obvious but just in case it wasn't). 

My car refused to start the other night. As luck would have it, I was miles away from my home at the time and it was much too late to call someone to ask for help.

Something told me it might be the battery. I'm not sure where this mechanical insight came from but not being one to ignore a gut feeling, I did what many women the world over might have done under similar circumstances. I removed one of my shoes and applied it to the battery connection points. After submitting my battery to several minutes of rigorous whacking, I jiggled the nearby connecting cables, just in case something had come loose. Feeling oddly optimistic, I tried to start my car again. Nothing happened.

So, I repeated the whacking and the jiggling routine. Still, nothing happened. Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; even I know that. So, I put my shoe back on.

By this time, it was almost midnight. I thought about calling my vehicle breakdown service, but experience told me that it could take at least 45 minutes for someone to get to me and I didn't want to spend about an hour waiting by the side of the road at that time of the night. So, I hailed a taxi. The taxi driver down his window and smiled. Now, I like to see happy, smiley people, just as much as the next person, but not if it is a taxi driver approaching midnight. When he announced his fare, he smiled. When I stood my ground and told him what I thought was a reasonable price, he did not smile. Instead, he took on the look of someone who had just been smacked on the side of the head with a wet fish. Oddly enough, I preferred this expression - at least it was real.

Sitting in the taxi, all alone in the dark, except for the strange unsmiling man at the wheel, I began to feel slightly nervous. I am sure most taxi drivers are decent, law-abiding citizens but I had read way too many stories about drivers gone bad to feel totally at ease. I called home and spoke to my answering machine. "Just to let you know that I'll be home soon. Look out for the taxi number 1234 at the gate," I said in a voice loud enough for the driver to hear.