Nobody’s perfect, not even a goddess. Mavis looked in the mirror. The grief she wore on her face reflected back at her. Mocking her every move. She didn’t want to go to school. She didn’t want to leave her room. The old wood door kept her safe from the monsters outside. The monsters that pushed her to the ground. The monsters that left the horrible scars on her body. The monsters that made her heart get sucked into the black hole in her chest. But she couldn’t. She had to face the demons. Mavis stumbled down the narrow crooked stairs of the small house. Her mom sat on the couch, with a beer in her hand and a cigarette in her mouth. Blowing small puffs of smoke into the stuffy air. Before her mom could wake, Mavis grabbed her schoolbooks …show more content…
Rust covered the old piece of metal. Unable to afford anything better, she stuck with it. She rode on, passing the dark side of her town, watching as Helios carried the Sun into the sky. Mesmerized by the warm colors, she watched the dome above her be filled with hope. Mavis’s school was just like her house, old, rusted, and filled with people that don’t care about her. She started her day with the same routine. Put her books in her locker, and get pushed against her locker by Lilith. As usual, Lilith called her a fat--- and went on her way. With every syllable, everyday, Mavis’s heart broke a little. She figured that over time she would get used to the name calling and her heart would become callused. While she waited, the distraction of her hours of homework distracted her. Once she got home, Mavis went up to her room. She couldn’t help but to look into the mirror. She hated what she saw. Ratted clothes, fat, and pale skin. She was a monster. Longley, she stared deeper into the mirror. Behind her appeared the beautiful goddess Olivia. Olivia was the goddess of mirrors. She crept behind young girls, looking down at their ugliness compared to her beauty. Little girls would never be able to live up to her presence because she was the most beautiful creature that would ever be. Taunting them, and convincing them to believe the horrible thoughts she pressed into the innocent’s minds. Then fading away like a shadow, leaving just her
There is a slight glimmer of hope when the school year ends and the girls all receive their report cards. They stand eagerly in the hallway, none of them can break their gaze at the slips of paper in their teacher’s hands. Pashtana finishes 15th in her class and in this moment looks forward to a new year in the 8th grade. Unfortunately, Pashtana and her family were living off of $7 a week, a dollar to spend a day. She soon got married to her cousin and has not been back to school since their last day.
Sidewalks are different shapes and sizes, people tend to make their own decisions to which way they would want to go. Going through the motions on a sidewalk is similar as going through the motions of life. There are many turns that could get you to your final destination and turns that can also get you into places you would not feel so comfortable being. Staying on the right path and trying to get to where you need to go isn’t so hard but when you have other sidewalks with nice grass and big beautiful street lights that can be a very big distraction to the eye and that could cause problems in your life. Nice sidewalks sometimes don't always tend to continue a nice path so they can be very believing at first but when you make it to the end
The story begins with Jodee’s description of how she was victimized in a 4th grade Catholic grammar school; coming to the defense of deaf children that were being treated cruelly. She supplied the school officials with names and was labeled a “tattletale.” No one would talk to her, recess was spent in anguish, and she would find garbage and spoiled food in her book bag. As she progressed into 5th grade some of the social atmosphere began to shift in subtle but profound ways. Being accepted into a clique was all that mattered. Instead of being admired for class participation, as in earlier years she was laughed at and labeled as “teacher’s pet.” She said the rules were simple “shun or be shunned—if you weren’t willing to go along with the crowd, you would become the reject.”
Her struggles are of a flower trying to blossom in a pile of garbage. Growing up in the poor side of the southside of Chicago, Mexican music blasting early in the morning or ducking from the bullets flying in a drive-by shooting. Julia solace is found in her writing, and in her high school English class. Mr. Ingram her English teacher asks her what she wants out of life she cries “I want to go to school. I want to see the word” and “I want so many things sometimes I can’t even stand it. I feel like I’m going to explode.” But Ama doesn’t see it that way, she just tells, Julia, she is a bad daughter because she wants to leave her family. The world is not what it seems. It is filled with evil and bad people that just want to her hurt and take advantage of
The story began with the picture of Sunday's night after church, at eleven o'clock in the evening. Delia was still working. As a washwoman, Monday's morning was important for her because she would return all the clean clothes and earn her money. That money was to pay for the house, her food, and the pony which Sykes, her husband, had gone with. After 15 years of marriage, Delia had lost all hopes in Sykes. The countless beatings and painful acts of Sykes had brought her to her limit. Sykes had gotten home, and as usual, the fight happened between two former lovers. Sykes's appearance by a scary scene was like the ev...
...e last beating she received from Hy-Lo, a recovery from the loss of her cat, a recovery from the emotional stress of listening to her mother and brother get beaten, and eventually a recovery from a broken life. The importance of the theme of forgiveness cannot be overlooked either as she struggles to leave behind the man that stole the childhood she deserved to have. He seems warmer and dies almost immediately after she forgives him, almost as if he too needed to be forgiven in order to move on. She is able to face the future by obtaining recovery through forgiveness, forgiveness through understanding, and understanding through confronting her past. McFadden paints a vivid picture and helps us understand the impacts of an abusive past in a very real way that leaves a deep impact on the reader. Even though it's difficult to read about abuse, I thought this was a good
Through a story of danger and a childlike characterization of Ma, Torres demonstrates Ma does not have inherent motherly qualities. In the chapter “The Lake,” Paps intends to teach Ma and the narrator to swim, an endeavor which almost drowns both of them. The narrator describes the episode saying, “Ma who had nearly drowned me, who had screamed and cried and dug her nails down into me” was “more frenzied and wild than I had ever known her to be” (Torres 21). Almost dragging down the narrator with her, Ma does not exhibit motherly qualities. Instead of protecting her son, who is in the same perilous situation, she protects herself, an action which does not reflect empathy, protection, and reliability. Using words like “screamed, “cried,” and “frenzied,” Torres characterizes the mother as young and wild, making her more childlike than the narrator. Like an animal, she digs “her nails down into” her son. In this moment of danger, she abandons her human side,
She didn’t wake up every morning, happy to go to the school and learn more things, instead she felt terrified wondering what was going to happen to her. Some days were not as bad like the others but there was some days that Melba could've really got hurt but she always found a way out without getting too injured. Kids just kept taunting her every moment of the day and the worst part was the teachers didn’t do anything about it. Even though they know she is a child too and that they should care that because she could get badly hurt and it would be the teacher's fault because they didn’t do anything about it or to stop
Margot goes to school with classmates that resent her. They hate her for having seen the sun, something they wanted so badly. This jealousy led to an overwhelming hatred that they were reminded of any time they saw her. Her classmates let their hatred take over and they locked her in a closet as revenge for the pain she had caused them all. But unlike Wendy and Peter from The Veldt, Margot was affected negatively from her classmateś actions.
By making subtle changes in the ways dreams are portrayed, she shows us that the boy has been changed by his experiences. Before “the betrayals” the dreams are quite indefinite, relying on incomplete images of pincers, claws and fangs to represent the horror. The lines, “His sidelong violence summoned/ fiends whose mosaic vision saw/ his heart entire” are literal indications of his incapability to comprehend what is happening to him. Then he wakes and attempts to seek comfort from the monstrance. His hopes for a miracle, brought on by his innocence, ...
Previously, the narrator has intimated, “She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own.” Her thoughts and emotions engulf her, but she does not “struggle” with them. They “belonged to her and were her own.” She does not have to share them with anyone; conversely, she must share her life and her money with her husband and children and with the many social organizations and functions her role demands.
One incident, for example, is when Claudia, Frieda, Pecola, and Maureen Peal, a well-loved “beauty” of Lorain, are walking home from school. As the girls saunter down the street, they begin to bicker. The conversation ends with Maureen stomping away and establishing the fact that she is indeed “cute”. Claudia then thinks to herself, “If she was cute--and if anything could be believed, she was--then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser. Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of our peers, the slippery light in the eyes of our teachers when they encouraged the Maureen Peals of the world. What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what?. . . And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred.
...her to feel despair. Her misery resulted in her doing unthinkable things such us the unexplainable bond with the woman in the wallpaper.
When she came to, Katherine’s body was racked with an insurmountable amount of pain. She felt like she’d topple over at the slightest gust of wind. The girl knew she’d have to call 911. She’d have to explain that her mother had attacked her, that she’d tried to gut her with a bread knife. Her movements were slow, jerky, and painful, and every breath, every step she took caused a wave of searing pain throughout her
Now being a thirteen-year-old girl who just called her mother the worst human being in the world, I wasn’t expecting that to come from her. When just moments before I’d been hiding in the hotel’s bathroom, thinking of every little scenario that could play out as my punishment. The ideas being as simple as my father yelling at me, others of me being grounded, or the bigger picture of them, hating me. So when they got Jacky, my sister, to usher me out of my sanctuary, I was plain terrified because of the habits I did even before then.