It was late afternoon on a dreary Saturday when I first met William Westbrook. I'd spent the day helping out in my Aunt's little flower shop, The Boot. It sounded more like a bar, and I had in fact once been in a bar called The Boot. It had been dark and dingy and full of men who spent their entire afternoons washing their mornings away with cheap vodka, only to go home and wash their afternoons away with cheap whiskey. From the outside, this little flower shop didn't look much more than that. The only thing informing potential passing customers that it was any different was the oversized black ceramic boot sitting just outside the door. A single white lily stood tall from it, casting a long shadow across the welcome mat. On the open door …show more content…
"Don't let that come between you two though. When he comes back and asks for your number, you be sure to give it to him." Again, I rolled my eyes. Iris and her daydreams. She'd been trying to set me up since I'd come back home; after six failed dates, we'd both given up. "That's not gonna happen. I'll probably never even see him again." I couldn't hide the sad resignation in my voice. That single thought was the most depressing thing I'd felt in three months, which was surprising, considering I didn't even know the guy and also, he just stole my lily. "You did like him!" "Like you said, he was cute." A funny look passed between us with that; we both knew he was way more than cute. "You know you're gonna have to rename this place now, right?" I said, trying to get away from the subject of the handsome stranger. "Nonsense! It was The Boot long before you brought that thing in, and it shall remain so." "If you say so..." Iris raised her eyebrows at me before returning to her little room, and I grabbed the thirty dollars off the counter, putting it in the cash register. "I'm gonna head home now, okay?" "Mm-hm, do you need a
“And maybe, if I had been destined to it or called to it strongly enough, it might have been for me.” Jayber was hoping that aunt Cordie and uncle Othy did not die during the winter season but there was nothing he could do when they got but take care of them both. “ By “bachelor” I mean, as was generally meant, a man old enough to be married who was not married and who had no visible chance to get married.” He wanted to marry Mattie Chatham, but she was married to Troy, and she thought Troy was the one that made her dreams come true. “ Maybe they had taken notice of my habit of keeping the shop open at night as long as people was there.” As long as people stayed at the shop after closing, hoping Jayber wanted them to stay for company. When everybody left Jayber, he was hoping for an impel and to start his own family. Jayber was looking to start a fresh new way, but he could not because he want to live the rest of his life with her. He moved along the riverside bank to be to himself, in a house that a friend had gave him with no rent. Being left alone, with nowhere to call home was the saddest thing could happen to anyone. “ By then I had no living relative, or none who was known of me.” In Port William, Jayber did not have a family because they all had died during the winter season. Jayber had taught himself how to do everything he needs to know to survive, therefore he taught himself how to be a
Walk through a door, and enter a new world. For John, raised in home resplendent with comfort and fine things, Ginny’s family’s apartment above the fruit market is a radically different environment than his own. Economic differences literally smack him in the face, as he enters the door and walks into towel hung to dry. “First lesson: how the poor do laundry” (Rylant 34). In this brief, potent scene, amidst “shirts, towels, underwear, pillowcases” hanging in a room strung with clotheslines, historical fiction finds crucial expression in the uncomfortable blush of a boy ready for a first date and unprepared for the world in which he finds himself.
Several chapters in Thomas King’s “Medicine River” deal with times in people’s lives when they were in a shadow, or a dark time. In each of these stories, Will uses a similar story from his past to elaborate more on the root concept of the hardship, and draw references to how they were handled in the past. In this way, the reader is given a unique view into Will’s personal memories and is therefore able to better understand his thoughts and actions on these occasions based on the experiences he’s had.
Stephen Crane’s novella, “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” deals with many difficult concepts and situations. However, the most prevalent seems to be the people that find themselves caught in a vicious cycle of violence. Although some claim that a literary label cannot possibly contain Crane’s work, his ideas certainly have much in common with other naturalistic writers of his time. He portrays poor Irish immigrants, the dregs of humanity, struggling for survival during the Industrial Revolution. Even while relating terrible events, Crane remains detached in the typical naturalistic style, seeming to view the world as a broad social experiment.
"That would be fine. Is this sufficient?" He reached into a pocket and dropped a dollar coin on the bar. It bounced a few times and Joe slapped his hand down to keep it from rolling off the bar. "Hope I didn't damage the wood."
The rain-laden trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silver-veined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty... (P 179)
Daniel gazed at her and sighed, “Look, I promised myself I would not date, not until after I got passed college and the part of my life I should have completed years ago. But I met you and I broke that promise so I could get you before someone else does”.
The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, Ann Charters, Bedford/St. Martin's, Sixth Edition (NOT compact) 2003, ISBN: 0 312 39729 1
And, there were all kinds of smells and odors haunting every corner of the place. The people who lived in those buildings were very poor, a lot of them were unemployed because of the great depression that occurred in the late nineteenth century – including Maggie’s and Jimmy’s parents. Unemployment was a great issue at that which gave way to a lot of social turmoil. Poor, unemployed people fell into desperation and resentment that led to violent behavior. For instance, in the reading, Maggie’s parents were often drunk, cursing about their pathetic lives, fighting, and breaking furniture.
“It was a large, beautiful room, rich and picturesque in the soft, dim light which the maid had turned low. She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mourning notes without promise, devoid even of hope. She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro, down its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the glittering circlet.
The setting is London in 1854, which is very different to anything we know today. Johnson’s description of this time and place makes it seem like a whole other world from the here and now....
“one of those cross streets peculiar to Western cities, situated in the heart of the residence quarter, but occupied by small trades people who lived in the rooms above their shops. There were corner drug stores with huge jars of red, yellow and green liquids in their windows, very brave and gay; stationers’ stores, where illustrated weeklies were tacked upon bulletin boards; barber shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking plumbers; offices; cheap restaurants, in whose windows one saw piles of unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs and cows knee deep in layers of white beans.”
In part one ‘London’ when William is ferrying the supercilious gentry, whom he had a strong sense of ‘hatred’ for, back and forth the river Thames, a women exposes the bottom of her leg sensually teasing William. The surge of anger he feels as the ineffectual man flaunts his wife, shows the rigid class system that condemns William to a life of poverty and backbreaking labour. Furthermore the dichotomy between upper class and lower class is evident through Thornhill’s boss Lucas when ‘Thornhill squints up into the brightness where Lucas looked down upon him’. Although, Thornhill might’ve felt a sense of power and superiority when he was assigned convicts Ned and Dan because he has people working for him and consequentially is now on the ascent up the social order, Captain Suckling’s treatment of him, as ‘he shooed Thornhill away with both hands as if he were a dog’ enforced that Thornhill would always be the felon from England many years ago regardless of his present
The setting for this novel was a constantly shifting one. Taking place during what seems to be the Late Industrial Revolution and the high of the British Empire, the era is portrayed amongst influential Englishmen, the value of the pound, the presence of steamers, railroads, ferries, and a European globe.
I found myself being tugged harshly into a corner bend alley way by a hand much more masculine and lanky than mine. The dull leather bag was snatched in the process of this event, half a second was all it took for the blood in my veins to pulsate in trepidation, half a second to damn myself for taking this way home. In this moment, the moon removed the shadow across half his face and I could see the stranger, a boy. His eyes danced with amusement, as if this situation gave him a thrill, I questioned him, and even though he was out of breath he simply replied, “I’m Alfie, the bakers’