i wasn't assigned it but i would read all the stories in my english book instead of whatever i was supposed to be doing and 'The Red Pony' burned its way into my brain forever. I probably read it in junior high? i dunno. That poor pony.
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I remember reading The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty sometime in late middle school, I wanna say.
teacher let us know after that it was about the Irish civil war, and that things similar to the story had actually happened.
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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.
Well "love that dog" made me cry a little just now, so thanks for that.
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I had to read "Speak". It was basically a short story about a girl getting SA'd and then treated like crap by everyone till the last couple pages. I do not think it had the intended effect they were going for.
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.
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"A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka. The whole thing is just one disturbing nightmare.
What did I just read? It just seemed so incoherent.
Just read the synopsis on Wikipedia. Holy fuck - Kafka really was something else...and very troubled.
“The Savage Mouth” by Komatsu Sakyou, which involves
Tap for spoiler
A man eating himself in a locked hotel room and relishing every bite. Very body horror, much terrifying, cops rule it a homicide
Or “Cogwheels” by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa, which
Tap for spoiler
ends abruptly with the author’s real-world suicide. Story is the thinnest veneer of fiction, and at some point I think he just stopped writing a story and was trying therapy on a page, then gave the fuck up on everything.
Tap for autocannibalism, I guess
"The Darkness Out There" by Penelope Lively.
In short, a "nice old lady" tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.
I think it was there for the "the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy".
Wow a lot more diverse than I was expecting, I figured 50% of these would be the tell-tale heart by Poe
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There Will Come Soft Rains
Someone already said it, but The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
In my fifth grade English class the four term themes were Civil War, Holocaust, dog books, and choose-your-own. For the first three units, my parents read all four options ahead of time and had me assigned to the least traumatizing. For the last term I picked Julie of the Wolves, a dog book disguised as a Wolf book; I'd always wondered why my second grade teacher suddenly stopped reading it to us at story time.
The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart
I was assigned The Westing Game no led than three times from K-12
My favorite report I wrote was when I got to pick Terry Pratchett's Night Watch in my dual-credit community college English course and the red pen in the margins of my report was all compliments
The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart
"The Veldt" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"? Those two stick with me due to two good readings of it.
The Veldt read by Leonard Nimoy and Tell-Tale Heart acted out by Vincent Price Part 1 and Part 2.
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The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Leguin
Nobody else for Equus?
"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.’’
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
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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.
Came here to say this. Fucking traumatising.
The Yellow Wallpaper caused my first panic attack (not to knock the story itself; it's an important feminist work)
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I liked The Yellow Wallpaper
To Build a Fire by Jack London
It’s a simple story about a guy trying to build a fire.
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He fails to build said fire.
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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 Bet, by Anton Chekov. That story has given me my existentialism
The Most Dangerous Game
Is Man... cala. Mancala, but where all the pieces are replaced with bits of TNT.
The short story that sticks with me from junior high, that I have not been able to track down in the last 40 years or so, was if I remember right another lottery style tale. I think it was just the husband and the one chosen was eaten by the rest of the community - the twist was that the eatee got to choose the method of preparation, and in the story, he chose to be served raw. Anyone recall this story? I'd love to track it down.
What a great twist. I've had solid success with ChatGPT for stuff like that in the past so put your description in and it couldn't come up with anything.
It did give some useful information which I can paste in here if you don't have an account?
Mostly it was asking if you could remember any other detail like character names, setting or even tone of the writing.
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"A modest proposal" by Jonathan Swift, I still occasionally think about it