Maybe try a poem.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell, 1945
I think that was the inspiration for the B-17 scene from the animated movie Heavy Metal, which fucked me up as a kid.
Holy fuck who wrote this?
I should have attributed, sorry.
Randall Jarrell, published in 1945.
Bomber ball turret gunners and tail gunners had the shortest life expectancy of any combat occupation in the war, as these were the first targets of incoming fighters. I found one site that said tail gunners’ combat life expectancy was four missions.
Ball turrets couldn’t reload in flight. The ball was too small for parachutes, and the mechanisms jammed or froze often. Typically they put small, young, single guys in them.
The Great Gatsby is a great novel about the immobility of class in America, despite the country’s claim to the opposite. I didn’t realize this in highschool when I read it, but damned if it wasn’t a warning of things to come.
For sale:
Baby shoes.
Never worn.
I can do that author one better (or three better):
For sale: baby.
For sale: baby. Never used.
Not exactly a short story, but Kipling’s The Young British Soldier still tumbles around in my head some 25 years later. Really cemented in me that I don’t want to go die in some other country for some fabricated sense of duty to my country. Not that I wanted to at that point, but for sure made it seem like an extra terrible idea.
“Today, students, we are going to learn about Carcosa.”
For me that was “The Man in the Well” which the school librarian read to us in 4th grade during library story hour.
Either I have a higher tolerance than most or my English teachers were pansies.
Though we did read the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank when I was in 8th grade.
Wait…you read the play version of a book? The fuck?
I don’t know that I’ve ever read the Diary in it’s entirety, but I’ve heard that there are some rather explicit parts, especially pertaining to Anne’s puberty, so maybe they did it to avoid that.
Those parts were not released by Anne’s father, they aren’t in any official edition.
Oh id forgotten they did that. We had to read the play of Of Mice and Men. It is not a book that is improved by being a play.
Flashbacks to when only the teacher and I understood A Modest Proposal and not being able to explain to anyone else in that class that i was appreciating that he was sassing the english NOT the actual idea of eating babies. 🙃
Y’all are taking about the girl with the green ribbon, my first year college lit teacher had us read a short story where a kid fist-fucked his mom and I’m feeling like maybe my education was problematic.
Terrible!
Tell me the title so I can shun it!
Oddly enough, Google is not turning up the story but it’s coming back with a lot of results
I’m assuming Reddit
Grew up with animals of farthing wood before school, your stories have no power here.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has entered the chat
Ray Bradbury “The Pedestrian”
My dad read “All summer in a day” to me when I was 5ish. I think I was being mean to another kid and he was trying to teach me a lesson. That story still sucks me up.
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“Class, today we’re going to start a VERY long lesson on allegory. It starts today with the reading of this short story, and it ends 30 years from now when you’re watching your last parent die in a hospital bed of old age with nothing you can do about it.”
Flowers for Algernon moment
Just think of the rabbits.
That’s of mice and men tho right?
That’s a novella but definitely more disturbing and more universal than most of the short stories in this thread
U ok bro?
I am! Thanks for asking.
I was riffing off the OP post. We’re exposed to ideas early in life (at school) that we don’t understand the gravity of until much later.
Watership Down (1978) was fucking terrifying as a child.
“Alright, class! We’re gonna read a story about a guy who locks himself in a hotel room with a decked-out kitchen, a surgery machine, and every prosthesis one could need, and this guy is gonna eat himself from the bottom up and describe it in careful, emotional, joyous detail!”
Yeeeeah, fuck that shit, decades later.
“The Savage Mouth” is the English title, by Komatsu Sakyou.
There was a Stephen King short story called Survivor Type where a doctor gets stranded on an island and eventually begins eating himself for sustenance. The story is told through the journal he keeps as he becomes more unhinged.
Very fun, gonna try to get ahold of it. Thanks!
Mang, if you want me to, I can just post it.
Yes please
I think everything here is in order and nothing’s missing, but I’m not about to reread it and find out.
What a delightful little read! Thank you so much!
Love you thanks!!!
Icky!
Highschool me would have LOVED to be assigned this. What grade were you in?
Fifth year or so. Something a teacher shared with me, that they probably shouldn’t have. It wasn’t mainline coursework, they just thought I was smart.
(Nope. Not smart, just have attention issues and look really smart at some things, and helplessly incapable at others.)
I have a similar reaction, but it was to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, about a woman locked in a room for a long period of time to deal with her mental health, and the solitude drives her quite insane. In quite haunting detail.
To be fair I think The Yellow Wallpaper at least has a fucking point instead of … what the fuck…
Fun historical note: many yellow paints and dyes used in that time period had some sort of neurotoxic heavy metal (probably mercury, IIRC) that actually caused or at least exacerbated symptoms of mental illness. Many of these compounds were relatively safe to use as paint in England, but when used in warmer, humid climates, they broke down and caused hallucinations as well as respiratory complications that caused the patients to be bedridden (further worsening the symptoms).
Lead makes yellow and red paints have a wonderfully bright colour.
Many children’s toys had lead paint because of course the kids liked the brighter colours.
Kids also love to chew on toys… and the lead paint even tastes sweet. It was always a recipe for disaster.
Lead is definitely used in lots of old paint, but I seem to recall that this one specifically was mercury-based as mercury can induce schizophrenia and hallucinations, whereas lead’s neurological effects are in the “makes you dull and slow” camp.
Also, lead was mostly used in the 1900’s, IIRC. Before that they used even nastier stuff like mercury, arsenic ( I think arsenic in the paint was the cause of death for Napoleon Bonaparte) and chromium.
But then I’m not an MD or a historian; just a chemist trying to recall all of this from bits and pieces I’ve read over the years, so I might be way off base with some of the specifics.
Apparently it was stomach cancer that did Napoleon in, though arsenic was suspected.
Lead in paints and even makeup can be traced back to the Roman Empire. It was popular long before the 1900’s!
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing! I wonder if the author knew that, or if yellow was just used a lot… (I’ve seen occasional older advice to paint kitchens yellow to make them “feel sunny”, but imho that’s not an easy color to live with. My mom had a patterned yellow antique couch that was just absolutely hideous… but it was the style at some point…)
Granted I haven’t read that story in a long time, but I think they knew about any of this at the time the story was written. However, I seem to recall that this was a fairly autobiographical story about the author’s experiences with post-partum depression and the “treatment” thereof, so it might just be that the cost the yellow wallpaper because it mirrored her experiences
Omg.
I got pictures of the text in English, further down my comment history. CTRL-F “autocannibalism”. I don’t have any Japanese copies, that was a long time ago.
CTRL-F “autocannibalism”.
Buddy no
Hot.
