"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."
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.
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.
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).
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
Nobody going to mention a Cask of Amontillado? Maybe not the most mind-bending example, but the tale of leading a supposed friend to their own horrific murder was not a thing I expected to be reading in school.
“For the love of God, Montresor!”
The reply to that just being "Yes, for the love of God," was cold as ice.
Was that before or after the school-shooting lockdown drills?
After the hide under your desk from nuclear bombs drills but before the active shooter drills.
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
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.
I think that was the inspiration for the B-17 scene from the animated movie Heavy Metal, which fucked me up as a kid.
Lots of great nightmares fuel here, but I can't believe nobody's mentioned The Lottery yet. The end of that story still makes me feel absolutely nauseous.
I had blocked that one from my memory; I remember now. Thanks. ಠ_ಠ
“Alright Class, today we are going to read “The Jaunt” by Stephen King and write a report about the effects of eternal nothingness on the human psyche” -my sick fuck English teacher in grade 7 for some reason.
I like my country, but not being born in Lithuania would have meant not reading Jurga Ivanauskaitė back at school and you all should consider yourselves lucky.
Ah yes, a nice short story about yellow wallpaper.
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.
"Today, students, we are going to learn about Carcosa."
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.
Not a short story but I recall we read Call of the Wild in school. Some nice animal cruelty for kids to think about.
I don't really remember any of the short stories assigned in English specifically, but I do remember one in my middle school textbook that I only remember because of the artwork. It was done by Stephen Gammel; the same dude that did the original artwork for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It's especially memorable because the story was just about some cute anthropomorphic animals working on a farm or something, but it had the same crazy "spider webs dripping with blood" style from the Scary Stories books.
I hella wish I could remember the name of the story, or at least the specific textbook it was in.
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.
9th Grade English, got assigned Invisible Man by Ellison. It wasn't science fiction like I thought it'd be 😅
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