Choose One of the Items from the Catelog Below to Analyze

CHOOSE ONE OF THE ITEMS FROM THE CATELOG BELOW TO ANALYZE

Short Stories

***Some of you have been approached and may write on “Golden Brown” or “Harlem.” If you have not been approached about this, than you must choose a different story or poem.***

(“The Flowers”)

(“Just Before Recess”—see below)

(“Seed”)

Poems

(“Richard Cory”)

(“All That Time”)

(“Dog’s Death”--warning: very sad)

(“Introduction to Poetry”)

“Death’s Theater” (On reverse side of Guideline Sheet)

“To A Wasp” (On reverse side of Guideline Sheet)

Just Before Recess – James Van Pelt

Parker kept a sun in his desk. He fed it gravel and twigs, and once his gum when it lost its flavor. The warm varnished desktop felt good against his forearms, and the desk’s toasty metal bottom kept the chill off his legs.

Today Mr. Earl was grading papers at the front of the class, every once in a while glancing up at the 3rd graders to make sure none of them were talking or passing notes or looking out the window. Parker would quickly shift his gaze down to his textbook so Mr. Earl wouldn’t give him the glare, a sure sign that Parker’s name would soon go up on the board with the other kids who had lost their lunch privileges for the day. He could feel Mr. Earl’s attention pass over him like a search light.

Slipping a pebble out of his pocket, Parker carefully lifted his desktop a quarter of an inch and slipped the rock in. It made a tiny clink when it dropped to the bottom. He leaned the desk away from him until he heard the pebble roll toward the sun, followed by the tiny hiss that meant the rock had vanished into it.

Two days ago he’d opened his desk to put his lunch in, but instead of the pencil box and tissue box and books he expected to see, a cloud swirled in the space, at its center, a dull, pulsing red glow. He shut the desk and looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. An hour later, the dusty swirl in his desk had contracted to a bright spot in the middle. He cautiously moved his hand toward it. At first he felt only the heat, but when he got within a few inches, the skin on his palm began to sting, like the flesh was pulling away. He snatched his hand back, then tried a pencil. When the point moved close enough, the pencil tugged toward the sun, then snapped out of his fingers into the tiny light, brightening it slightly in the process.

Now the sun was as large as a golf ball. When Parker rolled a marble across his desk, its path would curve toward the sun within, sometimes circling several times before resting exactly above it.

“Parker,” Mr. Earl said. “Your reading group is waiting for you.” In the back of the class, his three reading partners sat on the mats, their books on their laps. Parker pushed away from his desk and joined them.

“Where’s your book?” Mr. Earl said, his eyebrows contracting into a single line above his eyes.

Parker shrugged. Mr. Earl growled. “You need to be more responsible, young man. Go get your book.”

The other students looked on, relieved that Mr. Earl’s attention was on Parker and not on them.

“I don’t have it, sir,” said Parker. It had disappeared into the sun along with everything else.

Mr. Earl’s hands clenched slightly. Parker cringed as his teacher pushed away from his desk. Mr. Earl almost never left his desk. Students came to him. He didn’t go to students unless the infraction was terribly, terribly bad.

“You, young man, are irresponsible. Remember our talk about responsibility on the first day of school?” He looked at each of his students who nodded in turn. “Isn’t your book in your desk where it belongs?”

“No, sir,” said Parker. How could he explain about the swirling dust, the pulsing red glow, the sun’s pinpoint of light?

“Of course it is. That is where your books should always be. Everything in its place.A place for everything. Isn’t that right?” His question sounded like an accusation.

Parker nodded. “But my book isn’t there, Mr. Earl.”

The teacher took two long strides and stood beside Parker’s desk. Before the boy could speak, Mr. Earl threw the desktop open. For a second, he stared into it. A white glow reflected off his face. “What is this?” he said, as he reached toward the brightness.

“Careful, Mr. Earl,” Parker started to say, but it was too late.

The teacher screeched before lurching against the desk. He went down quickly, his feet vanishing into the desk last.

A long silence filled the room. Parker stood, walked back to his desk. The sun within had grown, its heat baking like a tiny oven. He closed the top, which snapped down hard on its own at the last moment.

The other students hadn’t moved. Parker looked at them. They looked at him. Over the intercom, a bell softly chimed.

“Recess,” said Parker, and they all ran outside to play.

Seed – N.V. Binder

I remember how the sky looked, in the early days, when we called our time Austerity, not Collapse. I was eleven years old and Huntsville, Alabama was at the peak of the weather boom. Ninety-one degrees in January, everything turning brown, ice and snow a fairy story for every kid under the age of thirteen.

The sky that year was brilliant yellow and red and orange from the dust — even at noon on a clear day, and they were all clear days. Huntsville was a big city then. The weather boom was economic, not meteorological. Great towers were going up all over the place; new water ’cyclers and refiltration systems were being produced on a planetary scale. And Redstone Federal Arsenal was the flickering heart of the entire jump program. The parabolars, those silver marvels, went up every month with hundreds of jumpers.

On jump days I skipped my morning classes. I went up to the roof of my tower. Dawn would be coming up over that strange sky, the ground steaming off the night’s humidity in seconds, hot wind stirring the drying trees. I got up on the observation ledge, heedless of the height, heart throbbing with excitement. If there was any cloud cover at all, even the wispy ones that were high up, I knew the jump was on. I kicked up a little roof-dust with my sneaker, and when the wind blew it, I knew which direction they’d come from.

Understand this: to seed the sky for rain, you have to have human jumpers. There’s something in the way we do it — it requires perfect accuracy, except when it doesn’t. Of course you could have AI plan the jumps, and sometimes they did, but in the end you needed people. It was always more like drawing a picture than building a wall. And art wasn’t the only reason to do it. During Austerity, the jumpers gave us pride. They gave us hope. Back then, it had seemed like the jump teams might yet turn the tide, and every military in the world had hundreds of them.

Those hot mornings, looking south and west from the tower I lived in, I could see the massive parabolars scream off the landing strip at the Arsenal, a dozen of them, right after another, like beads sliding off a string. Each one carried a tiny white glider containing two or three jumpers and all of their gear. Seconds after the first plane launched, the first sonic boom would shake the tower on its foundation, and my ears went numb for an hour or more.

That’s how close I was.

The parabolars rocketed right overhead. With so little cloud cover you could see them go and go and go, higher than you ever thought anything could fly, and then toss their precious cargo before plummeting toward Earth to collect their next load of jumpers. The white gliders whisked silently through the air like so many distant seagulls, and after a ten-count, you could see the jump teams spill out, flying their strange patterns against a dawn sky the color of candy sugar.

It was beautiful.

I was a girl on a roof, in the middle of a city too small to sustain its growth, in the middle of a country of denial, but for ten glorious minutes I was flying. I was free. And then, when the jumpers came close to the ground, their chemical packs spent, their chutes deployed and they’d glide over the city, sometimes crossing so close overhead that you could almost shake hands (and sometimes, it’s true, my hands shook).

It was the end of the world, but we didn’t know it then. I was grown before we knew for sure that the jumps weren’t working, that there weren’t enough chemicals in the world to hold off the drought, that Collapse would win the day. That was a long way away. On those jump mornings, when I was little, the clouds would billow up like cotton candy, beautiful in their blackness, and my parents wept, and they started planning what they would do next year, when things were better.

I believed in those jumpers with all my heart.

I always knew exactly what I wanted to be.