The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Oh that fucking thing.
Edit: wait so what exactly is the point of this?
It’s been near 15 years since I read it, but it’s kind of a cautionary tale about tradition, superstition, and how easily humans succumb to their base impulses and can commit insane violence.
Seems all too pertinent these days
Ohhh. I remember now. Thank you.
Came here to say this. Now I have to dig even deeper into my high school trauma to find something else, thanks. 🤣
Was gonna say this. Fucked me up for a bit after I read it.
Flowers for Algernon, that was thought provoking but also way too heavy for a 7th grade English class.
This shit made me fucking sob, I was also in seventh grade. I came to this comment section to mention it. Unforgettable
Jesus Christ. I read that aged 27 and cried like a baby. Way too heavy for grade school.
That was 5th grade for me. I still wonder what that teacher was thinking.
Did the teacher at least spend time discussing it, or did they just lay it on you and let you sort it out for yourselves? Either way, that’s pretty early!
It was discussed chapter by chapter. And we watched the movie version after for good measure.
Same here. We read FFA, The Veldt, The Tell Tale Heart, All Summer in a Day, and a few other short stories in some “advanced readers class,” that we had to go to the library once a week to attend.
I think they were trying to fuck up all the smart kids.
Was making sure this had a mention. This was brutal to read in 6th grade at 10 in the morning.
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
Tap for spoiler
It’s written as journal entries by a woman who may or may not have been insane before she got locked in an asylum or possibly just a room in her house by her husband. There’s a woman in the wallpaper who creepily crawls along the wall but actually it’s her shadow because she’s the creepy woman crawling around the room and rubbing up against the wall. Of course you don’t really know this until she starts really sounding crazy and starts ripping up the wallpaper trying to free the woman in the walls. In the end her husband returns home and either he faints or she fucking murders him with the blade she uses to sharpen her pencil. The book ends with her thinking she’s been freed, not by escaping through the now unlocked door but by entering the yellow wallpaper. There’s also a creepy film adaptation we watched that was… unsettling.
It was quite scarring for most of the kids in my 7th grade class.
Also I’ve only just now realized that wallpaper back then could have contained arsenic so going insane from being in contact with it constantly enough to stain your skin is a very real possibility.
The Yellow Wallpaper caused my first panic attack (not to knock the story itself; it’s an important feminist work)
The scariest part for me was that >!her husband is a doctor. She has stereotypical postpartum depression, but her husband’s idea of “helping her get healthy” is to lock her in an empty room, alone, and forbid her from doing anything, including writing. But she can have all the air she wants! !<
!Everyone around her thinks they’re helping while actively making her life worse.!<
Came here to say this. Fucking traumatising.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin is the one that came to mind for me.
Thank you for linking it. I really enjoyed reading it.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Leguin
The Hatchet when he kills the rabbit.
My 4th grade teacher read a chapter to the class every day, same with the sequel. I specifically remember the part where he was standing outside naked in winter and some tree bark just kinda exploded, and he was freaking out trying to decide if the freezing bark caused it to expand and explode or if a hunter was out there shooting bullets at him. Also, the part where he finds an orange-drink packet in the survival supplies of the plane and describes the taste of it.
Edit: I think the tree bark part was in the sequel, Brian’s Winter.
It was the sequel, and he’s not naked. He realized when one exploded infront of him and a (frozen) fragment got lodged in his hood
I must be combining scenes, but I distinctly remember one where it was made a point that he was naked at a point.
You’re dragging my memory back something like 20 years, but I feel like there was one he decided to get naked in summer and just stop for a few minutes. Nothing life threatening at that moment.
Could have been one of the 3 times he was warned winter was coming, but he was too distracted.
The Most Dangerous Game
Is Man… cala. Mancala, but where all the pieces are replaced with bits of TNT.
We had to read a story in 10th grade about this family that’s out on a road trip when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. A car pulls up and the driver steps out to assist the family. However, the grandmother (who up to this point was doing nothing but bitch and whine about everything) recognizes the stranger as a wanted criminal she saw on TV and stupidly points this out to everybody. Which naturally results in the entire family being executed one-by-one because they’re now witnesses.
A whole family erased, just because granny couldn’t keep her fat mouth shut for 5 minutes.
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”?
Yes, that’s the one. I couldn’t remember the name.
I forget a lot of it, except that last bit where the Misfit says something like “she could’ve been a good person if there’d been someone to shoot her every day of her life.”
Hadn’t read it before, so I just did. (It’s only 13 pages)
!Not only did Grandma call out the misfit to everyone, she caused the car accident in multiple ways: Bringing a cat on the trip, directing the family down a dirt road to a place she misremembered from a different state, scaring the cat enough that it clawed her son, the driver, in the shoulder, causing the car to flip and THEN was willing to sell out her entire family to survive.!<
Fuck grandma.
Yeah, she was terrible throughout the whole story. Not one redeeming quality.
The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury.
They didn’t make everyone read it though, just us “gifted/advanced” kids. It was one of several short stories that were in a special program book that I had to read.
I still think those kids were brats.
Edit: just looked it up and this was supposed to be 9th grade English??? We fucking had to read that as 5th graders.
Edit 2: I need to stop thinking about this, they also made us read All Summer in a Day, Flowers for Algernon, and The Tell Tale Heart in that class
I also took the “fucked up stories for smart kids” class
A retiring teacher at our school had his class read a story that lit a fire under a bunch of parents. It was The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
Direct link since the closing parenthesis breaks the formatting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Clarke_short_story)
Strange if its broken for some it works okay when I click on it.
The original link works fine for me, are you looking at it using actual lemmy, or an app?
Using Sync for mobile, it omits the closing parenthesis, but on web it works fine.
Sounds like the problem is with the app.
The one that stuck with me is The Cask of Amontillado.
me too but thats because i had to read it like 5 times to even understand what happened in the story
The Cask of Amontillado.
I remember reading it, and seeing it as a metaphor for killing off an aspect of yourself, like being a drunk, no matter how long or hard the process is, and hoping that it will never come back to haunt you.
The names are quite similar and I was trying to sober up at the time; I wasn’t going to admit to the grade 9 class the latter.
Montresor = Mon trésor is “my treasure”
Fortunato = the root word is “fortune”
“A modest proposal” by Jonathan Swift, I still occasionally think about it
The Library of Babel by Borges melted my brain as a teenager.
This one is SOOOOOO COOL though. Did not encounter it until I was in college
Not short stories, but I have two books that I read in high school that have stuck with me more than most:
You read Where the Red Fern Grows in high school? We read it in fourth grade. It was pretty traumatizing. Great, but traumatizing.
I read Fahrenheit 451 and my ass takes everything way too literally so maybe that’s why I was able to handle it. I liked it as a story and kinda saw the deeper meaning, good book
It wasn’t a short story, but a book that told a story in poems. The mc struggled with writing poetry and then he watched his dog get hit by a car and that made his poetry good or some shit. A room full of 5th graders wept. Book is called Love that Dog
We also read Old Yeller and cried collectively.
My 5th grade teacher loved that reoccurring theme, I guess? Dude was weird as hell.
When I was a kid the lady who ran a daycare out of her home that I attended would play the old yeller movie for us and it was probably our favorite film. I learned later from my mom that the secret is she conveniently ends the film before the ending so it’s just a happy story about a good doggie
Well “love that dog” made me cry a little just now, so thanks for that.
You’re welcome. I haven’t read it in years because it’s so sad. I have a copy sitting on my shelf because it’s genuinely a good book, but I haven’t cracked it open.
