English Language Arts: Author's Style (TEKS.ELA.9-12.9.F) Practice Test

The hallway held its breath. Between the humming fluorescents and the sibilant whisper of the air vents, a thin, cold patience gathered, as if the building itself were waiting to see who would move first. I pressed my palm to the door—once, twice—and the hinge answered with a courtesy so slight it sounded like a warning. Behind it the office lay in shallow relief, a palimpsest of shadows and shine: the brass nameplate drowned in gray, the plant slick with moon residue, the clock's second hand failing upward again and again, again. Step. Stop. Listen. The rhythm narrowed until it was barely rhythm at all, only the arithmetic of breath and bone. And still there came that sense—absurd, precise—that the light pooled too knowingly in the corners, that the carpet's nap had remembered the shape of my shoes, that the window did not look out so much as inward. I rehearsed explanations in a whispery litany—misfiled reports, an errand, a coffee cup left behind—each more brittle than the last, each shattering before it reached the tongue. Then, from the desk, a soft percussion: a paper sliding, or a finger tapping once, twice; a sound that argued, persuasively, with silence.

At first light the Hill Country does not wake so much as exhale, a long, cool ribbon drawn through limestone and live oak. Bluebonnets keep their counsel; even the creek, glassed over with sky, speaks in the subtlest plosives where it noses the roots. A windmill ticks its old arithmetic against the hush, and somewhere past the fenceline a bull snuffs, considers, decides against the effort of complaint. The air carries a cedar sweetness threaded with dust, with the memory of smoke from last night's pit, now drowsing to ash. It is not silence, exactly, but a choreography of smallness: the leaf's incremental pivot, the grass's careful abacus of dew, the meadowlark placing a single bead of sound and leaving it to glow. Sentences, like the day, prefer to unfurl; they take you by the elbow and walk you around, and around again, until the shape of the place is visible not in edges but in continuities. To call it peaceful is both true and thin. The mood here is patient, exacting; the land speaks in a measured syntax of ands and and agains, and the voice that listens becomes, by listening, slow enough to hear itself.