Personal Narrative-Home

Penny checked the time on her smart phone. “We have to be seated before the ceremony begins. I don’t want to be late. Okay?”
“Sure, Pen. Just a quick look. That’s all.”
“Okay. Then we head for Martin Place Station and catch a train.”
Storm gave her a nod of agreement. “Got it.”
They walked alongside the clusters of people with furled banners toward the domain. Patches of blue were showing through the clouds. The misty rain falling since they drove into Sydney had stopped by the time they left the hotel. The wet roads were drying rapidly. It was going to be a hot day.
They walked past a dusty stained blanket strewn over a sleeping bag that lay on the sidewalk between two columns of a bank. The outline of a resting body still visible in the

Close behind it came a large white painted armored van with a company logo on the side. The occupants of the car watched the protesters on the sidewalk. Eyeing the banners held high, even though the rallying point was still some distance away.
Eventually they fell in with the mass of people spilling across Macquarie Street. The noisy crowd stretched from one footpath to the other. They milled around like a great tidal pool before the ochre stone Parliament building of New South Wales. Storm and Penny stared aghast at the numbers surrounding them and stretching as far as they could see up the street. With young and old alike, men, woman, and children, they numbered in the thousands. Service workers stood, shoulder-to-shoulder with university students, the able-bodied stood next to chanting demonstrators in wheelchairs.
The police formed a preventive line outside the spiked metal fence surrounding the buildings. A row of blue in front of the podium. Were they there to protect the buildings or the speakers from the various trade unions? It wasn’t clear. The union representatives bellowed through bullhorn megaphones a list of complaints interspersed with calls to the crowd to show

HAVE THEY EVER DELIVERED TO US A FRACTION OF WHAT THEY PROMISED OVER THE YEARS? LOOK AT WHERE WE ARE NOW!”
Replies of agreement greeted his words.
“ARE WE UNITED?”
The crowd was unanimous. “Yes!”
“ARE WE NOT THE WORKERS? ARE WE NOT POWERFUL TOGETHER?”
Cheers broke out like a howling hurricane blowing through the city streets. The speakers with their megaphones and the police at the fence had vanished. A wave rolled through the crowd. Voices calling out, angry, urgent, righteous, urging the mass of discontent onwards. There were more people than Storm could have imagined. In any direction and between the building. Countless milling heads of people. Thousands of them.
Penny pulled at Storm’s arm. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. It’s nasty.”
“Okay.”
They made to find the outer fringe of the mass to make their way along the sidewalk. It was difficult to move against the current of a moving mass of bodies, a whirlpool threatening to pull them into the thick of it. With a growing sense of urgency, Penny locked her arm in his and began dragging him up the pavement with her.
“We gotta find a lane or a mall or something,” he said in her ear. “Then we can get down to the trains or out onto the other