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Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the author of six novels including the bestsellers Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails, and two short story collections including Demons in the Spring. His short fiction has been published in One Story, McSweeney's, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Hayden Ferry's Review, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mid-American-Review, Fourteen Hills, Washington Square Review, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR's Selected Shorts. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times and Chicago Magazine. He was a longtime contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts and politics magazine, before it ceased publication in 2007. His plays have been produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Paris, France. He is a professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.
Joe Meno

It was the summer that we, of our own guts, decided to become anesthesiologists. It was the summer that my twin sister and I went about capturing the smallest animals we could find and placing them in dirty green-glass jars which smelled of brine. Somehow, we discovered our father's medical tools hidden inside a suitcase in the attic of our garage. The case was coated in grey dust and had the fingerprints of ghosts along the hinge. When we unclasped the rusty latch, a sepia picture of our parents as children in love slipped out. There was my father, in a bow tie, and my mother in a starchy gown with a string of pearls that smiled along her neck like a second mouth. We put the photograph back in the case, held our hands over our lips, and went about pawing through the strange silver instruments, looking for something to take the bleary boredom out of the end of a summer that was meant to be intensely recuperative.

The house was to be completely silent at all times. Our mother direly needed rest and quiet. We were told this time and time again even though my sister and I had given up talking completely, relying instead, on elaborate hand signs. We were making our own language at the time; one without any words, a kind of code where you would spread your fingers to resemble a sparrow to indicate that you wanted to go outside; but then by placing the same gesture over your eyes, you might signal that you were sad or angry or very tired. The language was so imperfect that it was deeply beautiful, because each sign meant three things at least and the other's response was so inaccurate that it gave both of us the sense that we were psychic, because it was impossible that the signs we shared could not be right. We were only concerned with discussing one thing, so every expression our hands made told the same story over and over again, each motion, each sign. On the first day of summer, my mother's birthday, our father had hung himself in the cellar and the sound of that act was something none of us could get out of our minds.

Once, we found the medical bag however, the summer began to turn on its end for the better. Beyond the silvery scalpels and slender forceps and blunt tweezers, which our father had sometimes used to remove splinters from our fingers, we found something extraordinary: a hypodermic needle and a small vial of Belladonna, marked DANGER! PELIGROSO! SEDATIVE.

It was not long before we began to make use of the stuff then.

We decided to try it out on an insect, because it seemed pretty clear that insects were intended for this sort of experiment; if something went wrong and the patient were to die, it seemed very unlikely the creature would suffer much or be missed by family or friends having inexcusably expired. Also, insects, for the most part, were indubitably hard and not tender-soft. Scientifically, it seemed the luxury of pain, and the accompanying recipient of pain, the soul, which we had been forced to recognize in Sunday school, resided within things that were soft. So my sister argued, at least; Isabella being born three full minutes before me. It seemed an expeditious and more complete knowledge would always be her destiny.

We sedated things in this order with a variety of success: crickets, horseflies, bumblebees, wood bees, caterpillars, tiger moths, grasshoppers, stick bugs, box elder bugs, stag beetles, and finally, a single pill bug, which rolled up inside itself to rest and somehow never awoke again. In this first series of experiments, we decided a lower dosage was also preferable to a higher dosage; it seemed a high dose always ended with the patient becoming quite stiff, then spilling out its milky innards in a frenetic paroxysm of death. Most of the patients who were revived, however, simply hopped or flew or buzzed away, without any noticeable kind of side effect, except the only time I was allowed to inoculate the victim, a big golden wood bee, in which I accidentally punctured the wing in handling the hypodermic carelessly, ending with the poor fellow flying in circles around our head before wearing himself to a paralytic state and eventual submission to an exhaustive death. For the most part, I was the recorder of the experiments: Hypothesis, Tools Used, Process, Results, Conclusion. After the first few experiments, I simply made an addendum to the following trials in which I wrote, "See Experiment One," if the patient expired, or "See Experiment Five" if the patient managed to survive.

What really happened next was I began to get bored watching my older sister have all the fun. As always, Isabella was bossy, and after the mauling of the wood bee, I was not allowed access to any of the instruments. So, on my own, I decided to change the nature of the experiments. Instead of simply sedating the animals, I thought it would be much better to sedate them for a purpose, and the purpose I selected was, without a doubt, fantastic.

We would dress the animals up while they were asleep.

It was simple enough, really. My twin sister had a number of small doll outfits, cut perfectly to size for small four-legged creatures, like frogs, toads, snakes, salamanders, and field mice. We spent half the day trapping our quarry, with left-overs from the lunch the boil-necked nurse prepared for our mother, who was making no marked improvement, then the second half was devoted to the sedation and fitting of clothing.

For the most part, the animals did not seem to mind. My twin had become so adept that rarely was there a fatality, and in the small number of cases where the patient died, a fawn-colored bunny for example, it seemed all the more fitting that the deceased be dressed in small white bloomers and a velvety blue jumper. As my sister's skill with the hypodermic improved, I too, found myself able to match almost any animal to a corresponding outfit with a certain degree of alacrity. I could tie a row of miniature pink bows along any woodland creature's tail, coordinate miniature hoods and skirts, without fail, and even find funereal silver slippers of a silver hue for a blind shrew, which my sister over-sedated, thinking it was a mole with a much more durable constitution.

The animals, when they awoke, would fuss about in their garments at first, but slowly, slowly, my twin and I could see the patients enjoying themselves, prancing about, admiring their new couture, before disappearing back into the high prairie grass and then the woods. I often imagined a small child, or even better, a hunter of some kind, stumbling upon our beauties as they savaged about, spotting a pink-lace nightgown on a dove white rabbit, or a turtle with ribbons along its appendages and a shell painted corn-flower blue. I guess, to someone, the experiment might, at this turn, seem unnecessary and cruel. I would then bid that someone to take hold of a magnifying glass and study the dusky apparatus of his own youth. Someone might argue what we did lacked any meaning or motive, that we were simply terrorizing these innocent animals, when in fact, it was after several successful sedations, and their subsequent costumings, that we stumbled upon our true purpose.

(I would like to take credit for the notion, but truly, it was my twin sister who got the idea for the parade.)

Having properly acquainted herself with the medical way, Isabella, after long hours of watching our mother alternating between crying and sipping lentil broth at her bedroom window, a motion which seemed quite heart-rending and replete with mucous, either way, it was my sister who came to a diagnosis. Our mother had suffered a horrible shock, almost like a victim of electrocution. She found our father hanged in the cellar and not only that, but on her own birthday. It seemed scientific to believe a shock of a most equal and opposite magnitude would have a definite curative effect. Scientifically, we decided a parade of costumed animals would do the trick.

We spent the next three days trapping animals of all kinds. We were running out of sedative very quickly so if the therapy were to take place, it would have to be soon. The animals we selected were: a garter snake, which I decorated with several bells and ribbons, three baby rabbits, which Isabella dressed in matching gold skirts, several frogs, which looked dapper in fitted black pants and accompanying jackets, and a salamander, who wore gloves. As it was, there was just enough sedative for all the animals. Isabella, being very cautious not to provoke an overdose, emptied the contents of the vial as gently as a trained nurse. Then I went to work. Soon enough, all the animals had been sedated, then dressed, and we could hear our mother's tea whistling from inside the kitchen, which meant she would be waking soon.

We pushed the small red wagon out in front of our mother's bedroom window and gingerly arranged each ornamented animal in a small ellipse on the soft side lawn. When all the slumbering participants were in place, my twin and I began to shout loudly.

My mother came to the window, panicked, holding both hands over her chest. She stared at us for signs of injury and when she was sure we were all right, looked down at the still stagnant queue sleeping quietly at our feet. Our mother stood transfixed, somewhere on the brink of dream-like wonder and horror, and in that moment, it seemed the experiment could have gone either way.

But something had gone wrong. Our patients were not waking.

My mother stood there with her hands over her heart, seeing the delicate shambles, the massacre in pink and white bows, then she turned away.

It was at that moment, my sister, who realized the mistake. The sedative at the bottom of the vial had been more powerful; somehow it had not been diluted by light and movement and time. The usual dosage had been fatal for all the patients involved and the parade had turned into an execution by default.

Isabella shook her head, crying into the corner of her own arm, whimpering very gently and hiding her face.

"What? What's wrong?" I asked, not remembering the timbre of my own voice. I was getting angry and anxious, seeing her losing her control and demeanor like that because I still did not understand what had happened exactly.

"Matthew," she whispered. "We...we...we made a mistake."

"What? What is it?" and before she spoke, I suddenly imagined my father hanging in the cellar again, the rope creased tightly along his neck, his eyes tightly closed, the thoughts of regret, the resolve that had drove him to his end, weighing heavy in his head. What had he been thinking? What would he have said? In that instant, I understood what he had discovered. The sound of my sister's voice, which had become so unfamiliar, was now the sound of the realization he had made, echoing in my brain:

"Medicine never cures the heart-aches."

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The Use of Medicine Joe Meno - Goreyesque

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Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize.

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In the summer of 2002, Granta's Bad Company issue, which featured work by Milan Kundera, Arthur Miller, Gary Shteyngart and Edmund White, introduced a startlingly new voice: Jon McGregor. In his story 'What the Sky Sees', a young agriculture student from Lincolnshire is driving home after visiting his new lover, when he accidentally runs someone over. 'As the car hit him his arms lifted up to the sky and his back arched over the bonnet and his legs slid under one of the wheels and his whole body was dragged down to the road and out of sight.' Terrified of the consequences this will have on his chances of happiness, the man decides to bury the body and try to live with this secret knowledge, which inevitably takes a toll on his life and relationship. The story announced the arrival of one of the most significant talents of his generation, preceding the publication of McGregor's first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.

Ten years, two novels and many short stories later, McGregor returned to this first published work in order to rewrite it from the female perspective. The result is 'In Winter the Sky', which we publish today alongside the original story so that readers can compare the two versions.

He had something to tell her. He announced this the next
day, after the fog had cleared, while the floods still lay
over the fields. It looked like a difficult thing for him to
say. His hands were shaking. She asked him if it couldn't
wait until after she'd done some work, and he said that
there was always something else to do, some other
reason to wait and to not talk. All right, she said. Fine.
Bring the dogs. They gave his father some lunch, and
they walked out together along the path beside the drainage canal.
She knew what he wanted to tell her, but she didn't know
what he would say.

What she knew about him when she was seventeen: he
lived at the very end of the school-bus route; he was
planning to go to agricultural college when he finished
his A levels; he didn't talk much; he had nice hair; he
didn't have a girlfriend.

What she knew about him now: he didn't talk much; he
had a bald patch which he refused to protect from the
sun; he didn't read; he was a careful driver; he trimmed
his toenails by hand, in bed; he often forgot to remove
his boots when coming into the house; he said he still
loved her.

He was seventeen the first time he kissed a girl. The girl
had long dark hair, and brown eyes, and chapped lips.
They sank low in their seats on the school bus, leaning
together, and she took his face in her hands and pushed
her mouth on to his. She seemed to know what she was
doing, he said later. He was wrong. She drew away just
as he was beginning to get a sense of what he'd been
missing, and said that she'd like to see him again that
same evening. If he wasn't busy. They should go
somewhere, she said, do something. He didn't ask where,
or what. She got off the bus without saying anything else,
and went into her house without looking back. She ran
upstairs to her bedroom, and watched the bus move
slowly towards the horizon, and wrote about the boy in
her notebook.

Leaving March, where she lived then, the school bus
passed through Wimblington before swinging round to
follow the B1098, parallel to Sixteen Foot Drain, until it
stopped near Upwell. It was a journey he made every
day, from the school where he was studying for his A
levels to his father's house where he helped on the farm
in the evenings. Where the two of them run the farm
together now. The road beside the Sixteen Foot is
perfectly straight, lifted just above the level of the fields,
and looking out of the window that afternoon felt, he said
later, in a phrase she noted down, like he was passing
through the sky.

The girl's name was Joanna. The boy's name was

George. He came back for her the same night.

In summer the sky is most times blue.
A blue so pure & bright that it hurts to look into it.
A blue so deep that if you look straight up you grab something for fear of falling

in.
The light pouring which pours from out of this blueness
sears
everything it can reach

/ fields of wheat / canals & drains / tarmac roads /

In summer the sky is blue & lifted high

a shimmering blue silence from which

there is no hiding place

(save) beneath the surface of the land.

he came back for her
the taste of

like he was passing through the sky

to go somewhere and do something

He has told her this part of the story many times, with
the well-rehearsed air of a story being prepared for the
grandchildren, how he waited until his father was asleep
before taking the car-keys from the kitchen drawer, that
he'd driven before, pulling trailers of straw and silage
along farm tracks, but he didn't have a licence and his
father would never have given him permission, how he
remembered that she'd said she wanted to see him, to go
somewhere and do something, that he knew he couldn't
just sit there in that silent house, doing his homework
and listening to the weather forecast and getting ready for bed.

She wonders, now, what would have been different
if he had stayed home that night. She wants to know how
he thinks he would feel, if that were the case. An impossible
question, really.

The roads were empty and straight, and there was
enough moonlight to steer by. She saw him coming from
a long way off. Watching his headlights as they swung
around the corners and pointed the way towards her. She
was waiting outside by the time he got there.

She hadn't wanted to go anywhere in particular. She just
wanted to sit beside him in the car and drive through the
flatness of the landscape, looking down across the fields
from the elevated roads. They drove from her house to
Westry, over Twenty Foot Drain, past Whittlesey, and as
they passed through Pondersbridge she put her hand on
his thigh and kissed his ear. They crossed Forty Foot
Bridge and drove through Ticks Moor, the windows open
to the damp rich smell of a summer night in the fens, and
beside West Moor he put his hand into her hair. They
crossed the Old Bedford and New Bedford rivers, drove
through Ten Mile Bank, Salter's Lode and

In autumn the sky is most times white.
A ragged, dirty white.
And you wonder how this could be the same sky but it is.

The earth turns thick & hard beneath it.
Winds rip through the clouds and
slashes of light
run across the fields and vanish over the horizon and
leave

the land as heavy as before.

The colours of the earth change. Westry

Fields & ditches clog with leaves. Whittlesey

Rivers swell. Pondersbridge

Forty Foot Bridge

Ticks Moor

West Moor

Ten Mile Bank

Salter's Lode

Friday Bridge

We know the seasons are changing mostly by the shape
& colour of the sky.

s t r e t c h e d o v e r u s f r
o m

h o r i z o n t o h o r i z o n

t h e l e n g t h & b r e a d t h o f a d a y .

Outwell and on the edge of Friday Bridge she asked him
to stop the car and they kissed for a long time.

Afterwards, they looked out across the fields and talked.
They didn't know each other very well, then. He asked
about her family and she asked about his. He told her
about his mother, and she said she was sorry. She asked
what he was going to do when he left school and he said
he didn't know. He asked her the same and she said she
wanted to write but that her father wanted her to go to
agricultural college. She lifted his thin woollen jumper
over his head and drew shapes on his bare skin with the
sharp edge of her fingernail. She watched as he undid the
buttons of her blouse, and took his hands and placed
them against her breasts. There was the touch of her
whisper in his ear, and the taste of his mouth, and the feel
of her warm skin against his, and the way his scalp
moved when she pulled at his hair. Later, there was the
smell of him on her fingers as she stood outside her
house and watched him drive away in his father's car, the
two red lights getting smaller and smaller but never quite
fading from view in the dark, flat land.

He drove home along the straight road beside the Sixteen
Foot, holding his hand to his chest. The moonlight
shining off the narrow water. He was thinking about all
the things she'd said, just as she was thinking about all
the things he'd said.
He was thinking about his father, he said later, and
about how long his father had been alone, and about how
he knew now that he wouldn't be able to live on his own
in the same way. Not now he knew what it meant to be
with someone else.

In winter the sky is most times grey.

A dark & bruising grey.

The days shorten.

The distance between the horizon shrinks. What little
light
seeps down is thick & lifeless.

In winter there's no danger of falling into the sky

Our bodies anchored to the ground by the weight of the
light.

The earth hides secrets.

The land is silent.

The drains & canals will freeze and be covered in snow.

The snow will come fast in the night and
block the roads & drains and leave
nothing
but whiteness
(all lines & textures concealed).

The land giving back light to the sky.

He was still thinking about her when he drove into aThose arms lifted up to the sky, that arching back.
man and killed him.
First he was driving along the empty road thinking
about her, and then there was a man in the road looking
over his shoulder and the car was driving into him. It was
hard to know where he'd come from. He'd come from
nowhere. He was not there and then he was there and
there was no time to do anything. There was no time to
flinch, or to shout. He didn't even have time to move his
hand from his chest, and as the car hit the man he was
flung forwards and his hand was crushed against the
steering wheel. The man's arms lifted up to the sky and
his back arched over the bonnet and his legs slid under
one of the wheels and his whole body was dragged down
to the road and out of sight.
The sound the man's body made when the car struck

him. It was too loud, too firm, it sounded like a car driving
into a fence rather than a man. And the sound he made. That
muffled split-second of calling-out.

His arms lifted up to the sky, even his fingers pointing
upwards, as if there was something he could reach up
there to pull himself clear. His back arching over the
bonnet of the car before being dragged down. The jolt as
he was lost beneath the wheels. George's hand crushed
between his chest and the steering wheel.
Then stillness and quiet.
He lay on his back with his legs underneath him,
looking up at the night. His legs were so far underneath
him that they were most probably broken. George stood
by the car for a long time. The man didn't make a sound.
There was no sound

In spring the sky is all these colours. Spring comes
gradually here.
Broad beans & early wheat break through the surface of
the soil.
Pale green leaf buds squeeze out of dry birch branches
while the sky fades to light grey & white & finally a faint
blue.
The air cleanses itself is cleansed, with by
a warm wind from the south
bursts of sparkling rain

The sky lifts away from the ground. those armswives & mothers & daughters pregnant by
lifted
up to the sky.
The horizons draw apart
and stretch the sky taut and
space & light flood back into our lives.
that arching back.
This is the time when change
is a daily force:
woodlands smeared green overnight
fields purpled with lavender behind your
back

dawn

This is the time when the floods come
and the ditches and barriers have to be built again,
a little deeper
a little higher
But still, with all this life bursting up towards the sky,
(the earth holds secrets)
(the sky watches)

The hills having eyes means nothing here.
The land is level and all we have watching over us is the
sky.
anywhere. The night was quiet and the moon bright and
the air still and there was a man lying in the road a few
yards away. It didn't feel real, and there were times now
when they both wondered whether it had really happened
at all. But there was the way the man's neck felt when
George touched his fingers against the vein there. Not
cold, but not warm either, not warm enough: he feels like
a still-born calf. There was no pulse to feel. Only his
broken body on the tarmac, his eyes, his open mouth.
He was wearing a white shirt, a red V-necked
jumper, a frayed tweed jacket. His arms were up beside
his head, and his fists were tightly clenched. A broken
half-bottle of whisky was hanging from the pocket of his
jacket. There didn't seem to be any blood anywhere;
there were dirty black bruises on his face, which might
have been old bruises anyway, but there was no blood.
His clothes were ripped across the chest, but there was
no blood. It was hard to understand how a man could be
dragged under the wheels of a car and not bleed. It was

hard to understand how he could not bleed and yet die soThe whites of his eyes looked yellow under the
quickly.

moonlight.
It was hard to understand who he was, and why he
had been on the road in the middle of the night. Why he
was dead now. It was hard to know what to do. George
knelt beside him, looking out across the fields, up at the
sky, at his father's car, his shaking hands, the sky.

This place I've grown up in is a landscape
of lines,
a world of the parallel & perpendicular.

The straightest line of all is the hard blur of the
horizon.

------------------------
----

A single unbending line which encircles the day.

-----------------------
-----

When I was As a child I would spin around
with my eyes on the horizon trying to catch the place where
the line turned or bent but I never could

the mystery of the straight, encircling line.

- - - - - - - - -

(All the) other lines find their way to the horizon High lines, (Years ago, playing in the
connecting lines: telegraph wires furrows while your
father
railway tracks watched, you looked up +

canals saw a line of boats gliding
drains through the sky. The fear
rivers you felt, seeing those
boats above your head.)

Low lines,
boundary lines: ditches (No hedges or walls
roads between fields here,
paths only the ditches + roads.
Ditches to stop the sea
reclaiming what it owns.)

He had his reasons, he says. He's often regretted it, and
he's often thought that his reasons weren't enough, but
he thinks he would do the same again.
If he'd been older when he made that journey then
perhaps he would have been stronger; perhaps his thoughts
would have been clearer. But he was seventeen, and he had
never knelt beside a dead man before. So he drove away. He
stood up, and turned away from the man, and walked back
to

his father's car, and drove away. He didn't look in the
rear-view mirror, and he didn't turn around when he
slowed for the junction.
I suppose it was at that stage that I began to realize
what had happened what I had done.
That was how he put it, when he told her, walking
out on the path beside the canal after lunch, the dogs
running along ahead of them with their claws clicking on
the tarmac strip. He had driven his father's car into a man, and then
over him, and now that man was dead. He felt a sort of
sickness, a watery dread, starting somewhere down in his
guts and rising to the back of his throat. His hands were
locked on the wheel. He couldn't even blink.
And he knew, even before he got back to his father's
house, that he would have to return to the man. He couldn't
leave him laid out on the road like that, with his legs neatly
folded under his back. He knew, or he thought he knew,
that when the man was found then somehow he would
be found too, and the girl who'd drawn upon his bare
chest wouldn't even look him in the eye.

So it was her fault as well, it seems.

The lines of this place are sometimes washed out by
floods.
Obliteration.
Water erasing the (Cornelius the Dutchman +
his
man-made geometry army of hired men,
digging
restoring this place their way
through
to the sea it once was. the 17th
century.)

Sometimes it will be rain, swelling the rivers until they
break
through
and rush over the fields,
settling across hundreds of acres for weeks at a time,
sky below as well as above, clouds & seabirds gliding
overhead sky above as well as below, clouds & seabirds
gliding overland.

Or snow will cover everything, blocking drains & roads,
..........
Mothers forbidding their children to leave the house.
Lost children in the fields.

You said you don't remember your mother telling you toto
go out, but you would have been too young
remember/to go out.

Sometimes the fogcome in withthe
will

floods and
our world will
become
unmappable, alien,
precarious.

I didn't say you said it was my
fault
He fetched a shovel from a barn at his father's farm and
drove back to where he'd hit the man. It sounds so terrible
now. Cowardly? He carried the shovel down the embankment
to the field below the road and took off his thin jumper and
began to dig.

He was used to digging. The field had only recently been
harvested, and the stubble was still in the ground, so he
lay sections of topsoil to one side to be replaced. He was
thinking clearly, working quickly but properly, ignoring
the purpose of the hole. Once, knee-deep in the ground,
he looked up the bank and realized what he was doing.
But he couldn't see the man up on the road, so he
managed to swallow the rising sickness and dig some
more. And all this time, the sound of metal on soil, the
sky above.
And then it was deep enough. It was done. So long
as it was further beneath the surface than the plough-
blades would reach then it was deep enough, most
probably. He climbed up the embankment to the road,
wanting to hurry and get it done but holding back from
what he had to do, from the fact of having to touch him,
having to pick him upand carry him down the bank and
into the hole he had made. The death he had made in the
hole he had made in the earth. He bent down to take the
man's arms. He could smell whisky. He stopped,
unwilling to touch him, unwilling to go through with
what he'd found reason to do. They were good reasons,
but they didn't seem enough. But then he remembered
her skin on his, and her eyes, and he knew, he said, that
he could do anything not to lose that.

She'd made him do it, then. That was how it had
happened.

These same floods that obliterate bring life to the land,our soil the richest in the country.
make

At ploughing time the smell of the earth hangs in the air,
a smell like apple bruises and horse chestnut shells.
A smell of pure energy.

Your father claimed this ground
would grow five-pound notes
if you planted a shilling.

Flatness | straight lines | a man-made
geometry.
The sound of metal on soil // the sky above
This is the landscape you I we grew up in.
This is the landscape which grew us which made us.

The sea wants to be here. we shouldn't be surprised
when
will give to that
Our engineering gives way before the sea's desire.

You didn't say that. That's not what
you said
He gripped the man's elbows and lifted them up to his
waist. He backed away towards the embankment and the
man's legs unfolded from beneath him, his head rolling
down into his armpit, his half-bottle of whisky falling
from his pocketand breaking on the road. He didn't stop.
He kept dragging him away, away from the road, down
the bank, into the field.

She'd said, when he finally told her all this, that she
wanted to know it all. How it was done. How it had felt.
So now she knew.

He laid the man down beside the hole in the earth and
rolled him into it. The man fell face down, and he felt
bad about that, about the man's face being in the mud.
He went back to the place on the road and picked up the
pieces of glass. He threw them down on to the man's
back, and then he took the shovel and began to pile the
earth back into the hole.

He threw soil over the man until he was gone, until
the soil pressed down on him so that he was no longer a
man or a body or a victim or anything. Just an absence,
hidden under the ground. It was only then that he looked
up at the sky, dark and silent over him, the moon hidden
by a cloud. He drove past her house in March again, and
then back to his father's house. He put the car-keys away
in the kitchen drawer, and the shovel in the barn, and he
stood in the shower until the hot-water tank had emptied
and he was left standing beneath a trickle of water as
cold as stone.

So now she knew.

to name these placesThirty Foot
The words we've been given by our ancestors have
no poetry.
Our waterways are called drains,
not rivers or streams or brooks or burns:

Drain
Sixteen Foot
Drain
(and the closest to grandeur, this) Hundred Foot
Drain

our farms named for anonymity: Lower Field
Farm
Middle Field
Farm
Sixteen Foot
Farm

People don't come here because they've been
People are not drawn here by the romantic sound of the
place.
People don't much come here at all, and so the landscape
remains empty and
retains its beauty and

the beauty of this place is not in the names but the shapes(and sometimes not even that)
the flatness / hugeness / completeness of the
landscape.
Only what is beneath the surface of the earth is hidden

and everything else is made visible beneath the sky.

They were married before either of them had the chance
to go to university: his father retired early, after a heart
attack, and he had to take over the farm. It only made
sense for Joanna to move in and help. George had been
there when his father collapsed: he'd heard the dogs
barking at the tractor in the yard, and gone outside to see
his father clutching at his chest and turning pale. He'd
dragged him from the cab into the mud and begun
hammering on his chest. I didn't want to lose him to the
land as well. He'd beaten his father's heart with his fist,
and forced air into his lungs, and called out for help. She
was there with him. She rang the ambulance, and
watched him save his father's life, and decided she
would marry him. She can remember very clearly,
standing there and deciding that. He still thinks he was
the one who asked her.
When she remembers it now, it's always from a
height, as if she can see it the way the sky saw it: George
kneeling over his father in the mud of the yard, shouting
at him to hold on, the dogs circling and barking.

And now this giant of a man sits in an armchair clutchingwhen the first light slides in from the east
a hot-water bottle and watching the sky change colour
outside. He refuses to watch television, listening instead
to the radio while he keeps watch on the land and the
sky. He claims to take no interest in the running of the
farm: he signed everything over to them almost
immediately, and has rarely offered an opinion. But she
knows that he watches. She has seen him looking at a
newly ploughed field from the upstairs window, or
running a hand along a new piece of machinery in the
yard, or lingering by the kitchen table while she does the
accounts. She has seen the faint smiles and nods which
indicate that he is well pleased. She hopes that George
has noticed; she suspects that he has not.
When the dawn comes

the sky is the colour of marbles.
A thin, glassy grey.

Everything is dark away to the west,
silhouettes & shadows clinging to the last of the night,
but at the eastern edge of the horizon there is light.

And If you have the time to stand and watch,
you can trace the movement of the light into the
morning.
The lines of fields & roads creeping
towards you and then away to the west
until the whole geometry of the day is revealed.
And The water in the drains begins to steam & shine.

And you'll notice The workers start to arrive,
stepping out from minibuses and spreading across the
fields,
shadows crouching & shuffling
along the crop-lines lines of the crops.

Sometimes, when George takes his father his evening
meal, his father will talk about something he's heard on
the radio: a concert recording, a weather forecast, a news
report. Often they'll just sit, and George will listen to his
father's short creaking breaths, thankful to have him
there still. She doesn't sit with them at these times. She
reads, or deals with paperwork, or goes back to her
writing, waiting for George to reassure himself that his
father is well.
They've never had children, and this has They've never talked about it, and yet

In this way, their lives together had settled into
something like a routine. He was up first, feeding the
dogs, bringing her a cup of tea, eating his breakfast and
leaving his dishes on the table. She dressed, and dealt
with correspondence, and waited until she heard the
radio in his father's bedroom before going to help him
dress.

Caring for his father had taken up more and more of theirIn the mornings and
time over the years. His health was poor enough to
justify moving him into a nursing home. There was one
over in March; she had a friend whose mother was there,
and had heard good reports. But it was obvious that his
father would refuse to go. And she had been unable to
find a way of bringing it up with George. There were so
many things she was unable to bring up with him.
Sometimes it felt as though they only related to each
other through talking about work, about the business. As
business partners, they have been close, communicative,
collaborative. All those good words.
the afternoons, they worked in the fields. That wasn't
really true. It might have been true once, in the very early
days, when they'd had to work

When the mid-morning comes
the sky is the colour of flowering linseed
a pale-blue hint of
the full colour to come

Sometimes there will be clouds, joining together to form
arches
from horizon to stretching
tearing
scattering patterns across the fields.

Sometimes these clouds bring rain,

and the sky will darken
But the rain will pass
the sky be brighter clearer

The workers more visible,
returning to their trays & boxes after the rain,
lifting food from the ground,
sorting
trimming
laying down
moving along the line.

Occasionally one will stand, lifting cramped arms to the
sky before returning to the soil.

Those lifted arms, that arching back.

hard all the hours of daylight to try and pull the business
out of the hole his father had dug it into. There'd been no
money to employ extra labour, and they'd had to do
everything themselves. There was less land then, but it
was still a struggle and they were always exhausted by
the time they found their way to bed.
But things had changed, gradually. They'd bought
more land, secured more grants and loans. Diversified.
And almost without noticing, they'd stopped being
farmers and become managers. Most of the field-work
was done by labourers hired by subcontractors, people
they never spoke to. George still liked to do some of the
work himself - the ploughing, the ditch-digging, the
heavy machine-based jobs - but there was no real need.
For the most part they spent their days on the phone, or
filling out forms, buying supplies, dealing with inspectors,
negotiating with the water authorities. Discussions about
drainage and flood defences seemed to take more and more
of her time now. The floods seemed to be coming more often,
covering more land, taking longer to drain. Maybe we should
switch to rice, George had started saying, and she wasn't sure
whether or not this was a joke.

All of which meant that when he announced that he
wanted to tell her something, and that they should take
the time to walk out along the path beside the canal after
lunch, it was no real interruption to the running of the
farm. Down in the few

When the noon-time comescircle of the
(when there's a moment of stillness and silence)
the sky is the colour of the summer noon:
a blue with no comparison
the pure deep blue of the summer noon in this
place.
No clouds
no movement
you hold your breath and turn and follow the
unbending horizon line horizon's circle.

Celery &
spring onions &
leeks &
lettuces &
fragile crops which would be ruined by machinery.

fields which weren't yet flooded, the workers carried on,
their backs bent low, and she was able to stop him and
put her hand to his chest and ask what it was he wanted
to say.
In the evenings, he often spent time in the barn,
fixing things. She would spend that time walking
backwards and forwards from the house to the barn,
offering to help, and having that help warmly but firmly
rejected. He was unable to admit, even now, that she was
better than he was at mechanical jobs: repair, maintenance,
improvised alteration and the like. Her father had been a
mechanic. It was natural that she would have an ability in
that area. But still, he found it difficult to accept.

At the same time, he found it difficult to have
sufficient patience with, or tolerance of, the writing she
did. She had only ever called it writing: he was the one
who used the word 'poems'. But whenever he said it -
'poems' - it was with an affected air, as if the pretension
was hers. So, for example, he might come crashing in
from the barn late one afternoon, with his boots on, and
say Would you just leave your bloody poems alone for
one minute and help me get the seed-drill loaded up?
There were five other places he could have put the
bloody in that sentence, but he chose to put it there, next
to 'poems'. This is an example, she would tell him, if he
was interested, of what placement could do.

When the late afternoon comes
(when the light is only beginning to fade from the fall)
the sky is the colour of a freshly-forming bruise.

The workers are slowing their pace
pausing more frequently to savour
the warmth of the soil in their hands
aware now of the slight chill in the air
waiting
for the word that the day is over.

- - - - - - - -

What placement can do.

- - - - - - - -

When the evening comes
(before the embers of the closing of the
day)
the sky is the colour of your father's eyes.

A darkening, muddied blue,
hiding shadows
turning away. Awake, still;
alive, just;
but going.
Going gently.

The workers have left the field and collected their pay,
measured by the weight of the food they have gathered.

The marks of their footprints are fading,
dusted over with soil blown in by a wind from the sea.

Once, he says, he saw a man metal-detecting in that field.
He was driving past and saw a car parked on the verge, a
faint line of footprints leading out across the soil. The
light was clear and strong, and the man in the field was
no more than a silhouette. He sat in his car, watching.
Twice he saw the man stoop to the ground and dig with a
small shovel. Twice he saw him stand and kick the earth
back into place, and continue his steady sweeping with
the metal detector. He wanted to go and tell him to stop,
but there was no good reason for doing so. It wasn't his
land. The man would surely have asked permission, and
anyway he was doing no damage so soon after harvest.

He wondered what the man thought he was going to find,
he says. He had a sudden feeling of inevitability; that this
would be the moment when the body was found, the
moment when everything could be made right. He
thought about going to fetch Joanna, so she could be
there to see it as well.
He'd been living like this for years, it would seem,
lurching between a trembling silence and a barely
withheld confessional urge. When he thought about it
later, he realized there was no reason why a man with a
metal detector should find a body. But that kind of
logical thoughtseemed to crumble in the face of these
moments.
He got out of the car, and waited. The man in the
field looked up at George, and George looked down at
him. Ready. The man packed his tools into a bag and
began hurrying back to his car, stumbling slightly across
the low stubble.
Did you find anything? George asked.
No, the man said, nothing. And he got in his car
and drove away.

What he thought he'd find.

There is no history here.

No dramatic finds of Saxon villages.No Tollund Man.
No burial mounds or hidden treasures.

Only the rusted anchors our ploughs drag up,
left when these fields were the sea.

Those rusted anchors have been sunk in the soil
ever since before it was drained, and sometimes
the turning of the earth brings them closer to the surface
and sometimes
it will sends them further down.

Buried out there at the edge of the field.Butyouwerethere

The sound of plough metal on soil, the roar
of stones & earth.

As he/it Tumbles further down or is hauled to the
surface.

break the flat surface

This is the way it happens, in the end. This is the way heHe was driving, he said. There were
describes it, when he tells her:
bright lights,
and men in white overalls standing in the water. There
were police officers along the embankment and a white
tent on the verge. There were police vans in the road. A
policeman was directing the traffic through from either
direction. The men in white overalls were doing something
with poles and tape. He could hardly breathe, he said. There
was something like a rushing sound in his ears.

The policeman waved at him to stop, and walked over to
the car, and asked George to wind the window down. He
reminded George that they were at school together, and
George didn't know what to say. A funny do this, isn't it,
the policeman said. George thought the policeman was
probably waiting for him to ask what had happenedbut
he didn't say anything. The policeman told him anyway:
they'd found a body in the water. The farmer had seen it.
They were assuming it had been buried for years, and
that the flood water must have disturbed the soil and
brought it out. There wasn't much left of it now. The
policeman said he couldn't imagine they'd find out who
it was, and then he asked after the family and said he
should let George get on. George said that his wife and
his father were both fine and drove slowly into the fog.

That field. In that field. Down by that field.

The floods have come, again,
the road like a causeway
across the sea.

T h e w a t e r s t r e t c h e d a s f a r a s t h e h o
r i z o n
t h e
h o r i z o n
l o s t
i n t h e
t h i c k
f o g.

Telegraph poles dotted
across the water
like the masts
of sunken boats.

The cars marooned. High & dry.
Piercing red lights suspended in a long line through
the fog.

Later, he drove into the yard and the dogs came barking
out to meet him. He sat in the car for a moment, too
weak to open the door. Joanna could see him from the
kitchen window. She stood and watched. She wondered
what was wrong. The lights of the house were clear and
warm, spilling into the foggy night. He got out of the car
and walked to the house, pushing the dogs away, and she
came to meet him in the hallway. He looked at her and
said that they needed to talk. She said it would have to
wait until she'd finished some more work, and he said
there was always something else to do, some other
reason to wait and to not talk. He said they couldn't go
on like this, it had gone on for too long, they were young
when it happened, they were older now, time had passed,
they needed to bring things out into the open and deal
with the consequences and stop trying to hide what it was
doing to them both. She looked at him. It was the most
she had heard him say for a long time. It didn't fit. All
right, she said. Fine. Bring the dogs.

He served the meal she had prepared for his father and
took it through to him.
They found a body in the field down the road, his
father said.
George nodded, and said that he'd heard.
Can't think it was anyone from round here, his
father said.
No, George said. I shouldn't think so.

The mists of yesterday have disappeared,

the sky reflected clearly in the flooded fields

the sky reflected clearly in the flooded fields.

The day is broken open & clear:

the great ship of Ely Cathedral
just visible
across the water.
Photograph by jurek d

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In Winter the Sky | Jon McGregor | Granta Magazine

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In the summer of 2002, Granta's Bad Company issue, which featured work by Milan Kundera, Arthur Miller, Gary Shteyngart and Edmund White, introduced a startlingly new voice: Jon McGregor. In his story 'What the Sky Sees', a young agriculture student from Lincolnshire is driving home after visiting his new lover, when he accidentally runs someone over.

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The passengers who had left Rome by the night express had had to stop until dawn at the small station of Fabriano in order to continue their journey by the small old-fashioned "local" joining the main line with Sulmona.

At dawn, in a stuffy and smoky second-class carriage in which five people had already spent the night, a bulky woman in deep mourning, was hoisted in-almost like a shapeless bundle. Behind her-puffing and moaning, followed her husband-a tiny man, thin and weakly, his face death-white, his eyes small and bright and looking shy and uneasy.

Having at last taken a seat he politely thanked the passengers who had helped his wife and who had made room for her; then he turned round to the woman trying to pull down the collar of her coat and politely enquired:

"Are you all right, dear?"

The wife, instead of answering, pulled up her collar again to her eyes, so as to hide her face.

"Nasty world," muttered the husband with a sad smile.

And he felt it his duty to explain to his traveling companions that the poor woman was to be pitied for the war was taking away from her her only son, a boy of twenty to whom both had devoted their entire life, even breaking up their home at Sulmona to follow him to Rome where he had to go as a student, then allowing him to volunteer for war with an assurance, however, that at least for six months he would not be sent to the front and now, all of a sudden, receiving a wire saying that he was due to leave in three days' time and asking them to go and see him off.

The woman under the big coat was twisting and wriggling, at times growling like a wild animal, feeling certain that all those explanations would not have aroused even a shadow of sympathy from those people who-most likely-were in the same plight as herself. One of them, who had been listening with particular attention, said:

"You should thank God that your son is only leaving now for the front. Mine has been sent there the first day of the war. He has already come back twice wounded and been sent back again to the front."

"What about me? I have two sons and three nephews at the front," said another passenger.

"Maybe, but in our case it is our only son," ventured the husband.

"What difference can it make? You may spoil your only son with excessive attentions, but you cannot love him more than you would all your other children if you had any. Paternal love is not like bread that can be broken into pieces and split amongst the children in equal shares. A father gives all his love to each one of his children without discrimination, whether it be one or ten, and if I am suffering now for my two sons, I am not suffering half for each of them but double...."

"True ... true ..." sighed the embarrassed husband, "but suppose (of course we all hope it will never be your case) a father has two sons at the front and he loses one of them, there is still one left to console him ... while ..."

"Yes," answered the other, getting cross, "a son left to console him but also a son left for whom he must survive, while in the case of the father of an only son if the son dies the father can die too and put an end to his distress. Which of the two positions is the worse? Don't you see how my case would be worse than yours?"

"Nonsense," interrupted another traveler, a fat, red-faced man with bloodshot eyes of the palest gray.

He was panting. From his bulging eyes seemed to spurt inner violence of an uncontrolled vitality which his weakened body could hardly contain.

"Nonsense," he repeated, trying to cover his mouth with his hand so as to hide the two missing front teeth. "Nonsense. Do we give life to our children for our own benefit?"

The other travelers stared at him in distress. The one who had had his son at the front since the first day of the war sighed: "You are right. Our children do not belong to us, they belong to the Country...."

"Bosh," retorted the fat traveler. "Do we think of the Country when we give life to our children? Our sons are born because ... well, because they must be born and when they come to life they take our own life with them. This is the truth. We belong to them but they never belong to us. And when they reach twenty they are exactly what we were at their age. We too had a father and mother, but there were so many other things as well ... girls, cigarettes, illusions, new ties ... and the Country, of course, whose call we would have answered-when we were twenty-even if father and mother had said no. Now, at our age, the love of our Country is still great, of course, but stronger than it is the love for our children. Is there any one of us here who wouldn't gladly take his son's place at the front if he could?"

There was a silence all round, everybody nodding as to approve.

"Why then," continued the fat man, "shouldn't we consider the feelings of our children when they are twenty? Isn't it natural that at their age they should consider the love for their Country (I am speaking of decent boys, of course) even greater than the love for us? Isn't it natural that it should be so, as after all they must look upon us as upon old boys who cannot move any more and must stay at home? If Country exists, if Country is a natural necessity like bread, of which each of us must eat in order not to die of hunger, somebody must go to defend it. And our sons go, when they are twenty, and they don't want tears, because if they die, they die inflamed and happy (I am speaking, of course, of decent boys). Now, if one dies young and happy, without having the ugly sides of life, the boredom of it, the pettiness, the bitterness of disillusion ... what more can we ask for him? Everyone should stop crying: everyone should laugh, as I do ... or at least thank God-as I do-because my son, before dying, sent me a message saying that he was dying satisfied at having ended his life in the best way he could have wished. That is why, as you see, I do not even wear mourning...."

He shook his light fawn coat as to show it; his livid lip over his missing teeth was trembling, his eyes were watery and motionless, and soon after, he ended with a shrill laugh which might well have been a sob.

"Quite so ... quite so ..." agreed the others.

The woman who, bundled in a corner under her coat, had been sitting and listening had-for the last three months-tried to find in the words of her husband and her friends something to console her in her deep sorrow, something that might show her how a mother should resign herself to send her son not even to death but to a probable danger of life. Yet not a word had she found amongst the many which had been said ... and her grief had been greater in seeing that nobody-as she thought-could share her feelings.

But now the words of the traveler amazed and almost stunned her. She suddenly realized that it wasn't the others who were wrong and could not understand her but herself who could not rise up to the same height of those fathers and mothers willing to resign themselves, without crying, not only to the departure of their sons but even to their death.

She lifted her head, she bent over from her corner trying to listen with great attention to the details which the fat man was giving to his companions about the way his son had fallen as a hero, for his King and his Country, happy and without regrets. It seemed to her that she had stumbled into a world she had never dreamt of, a world so far unknown to her and she was so pleased to hear everyone joining in congratulating that brave father who could so stoically speak of his child's death.

Then suddenly, just as if she had heard nothing of what had been said and almost as if waking up from a dream, she turned to the old man, asking him:

"Then ... is your son really dead?"

Everybody stared at her. The old man, too, turned to look at her, fixing his great, bulging, horribly watery light gray eyes, deep in her face. For some little time he tried to answer, but words failed him. He looked and looked at her, almost as if only then-at that silly, incongruous question-he had suddenly realized at last that his son was really dead ... gone forever ... forever. His face contracted, became horribly distorted, then he snatched in haste a handkerchief from his pocket and, to the amazement of everyone, broke into harrowing, heart-rending, uncontrollable sobs.

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The passengers who had left Rome by the night express had had to stop until dawn at the small station of Fabriano in order to continue their journey by the small old-fashioned "local" joining the main line with Sulmona.

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This story was first published in 1894 as The Dream of an Hour before being republished under this title in 1895. We encourage students and teachers to use our The Story of An Hour Study Guide and Feminist Literature Study Guide.

Carl Halsoe, Waiting by the Window, 1863

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under the breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.

Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."

"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.

Earlier, I pointed out that this story was first published in 1894 as The Dream of an Hour before being republished in 1895 as The Story of an Hour. Having read the story, why do you suppose Kate Chopin chose to change that one word? Given societal norms and expecations about women and marriage in 1895, do you see how simply changing a single word in the title may have been an answer to the controversy and criticism that the story received at that time?

The Story of an Hour is one of the stories featured in our collection of Short Stories for High School I and Short Short Stories to read when you have five minutes to indulge yourself reading a great story.

Add The Story of An Hour to your library.

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The Story of An Hour, a Short Story by Kate Chopin.

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To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time, a Poem by Robert Herrick.

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Originally published as, "Stephen Crane's Own Story" (1897), The Open Boat is based on the real-life ordeal Crane endured, when the boat he was taking to Cuba ran aground and sank off the Florida coast. Read more background on The American Literary Blog. A Tale intended to be after the fact. Being the experience of four men from the sunk steamer "Commodore" I
None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks. Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.

The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: "Gawd! That was a narrow clip." As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward over the broken sea.

The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.

The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was there.

The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he commanded for a day or a decade, and this captain had on him the stern impression of a scene in the greys of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a top-mast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low and lower, and down. Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was, deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears.

"Keep 'er a little more south, Billie," said he.

"'A little more south,' sir," said the oiler in the stern.

A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and by the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline, and arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dingey one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience which is never at sea in a dingey. As each slatey wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water. There was a terrible grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests.

In the wan light, the faces of the men must have been grey. Their eyes must have glinted in strange ways as they gazed steadily astern. Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly picturesque. But the men in the boat had no time to see it, and if they had had leisure there were other things to occupy their minds. The sun swung steadily up the sky, and they knew it was broad day because the color of the sea changed from slate to emerald-green, streaked with amber lights, and the foam was like tumbling snow. The process of the breaking day was unknown to them. They were aware only of this effect upon the color of the waves that rolled toward them.

In disjointed sentences the cook and the correspondent argued as to the difference between a life-saving station and a house of refuge. The cook had said: "There's a house of refuge just north of the Mosquito Inlet Light, and as soon as they see us, they'll come off in their boat and pick us up."

"As soon as who see us?" said the correspondent.

"The crew," said the cook.

"Houses of refuge don't have crews," said the correspondent. "As I understand them, they are only places where clothes and grub are stored for the benefit of shipwrecked people. They don't carry crews."

"Oh, yes, they do," said the cook.

"No, they don't," said the correspondent.

"Well, we're not there yet, anyhow," said the oiler, in the stern.

"Well," said the cook, "perhaps it's not a house of refuge that I'm thinking of as being near Mosquito Inlet Light. Perhaps it's a life- saving station."

"We're not there yet," said the oiler, in the stern.
II
As the boat bounced from the top of each wave, the wind tore through the hair of the hatless men, and as the craft plopped her stern down again the spray splashed past them. The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed, for a moment, a broad tumultuous expanse, shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.

"Bully good thing it's an on-shore wind," said the cook; "If not, where would we be? Wouldn't have a show."

"That's right," said the correspondent.

The busy oiler nodded his assent.

Then the captain, in the bow, chuckled in a way that expressed humor, contempt, tragedy, all in one. "Do you think We've got much of a show now, boys?" said he.

Whereupon the three were silent, save for a trifle of hemming and hawing. To express any particular optimism at this time they felt to be childish and stupid, but they all doubtless possessed this sense of the situation in their mind. A young man thinks doggedly at such times. On the other hand, the ethics of their condition was decidedly against any open suggestion of hopelessness. So they were silent.

"Oh, well," said the captain, soothing his children, "We'll get ashore all right."

But there was that in his tone which made them think, so the oiler quoth: "Yes! If this wind holds!"

The cook was bailing: "Yes! If we don't catch hell in the surf."

Canton flannel gulls flew near and far. Sometimes they sat down on the sea, near patches of brown seaweed that rolled on the waves with a movement like carpets on a line in a gale. The birds sat comfortably in groups, and they were envied by some in the dingey, for the wrath of the sea was no more to them than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland. Often they came very close and stared at the men with black bead-like eyes. At these times they were uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny, and the men hooted angrily at them, telling them to be gone. One came, and evidently decided to alight on the top of the captain's head. The bird flew parallel to the boat and did not circle, but made short sidelong jumps in the air in chicken- fashion. His black eyes were wistfully fixed upon the captain's head. "Ugly brute," said the oiler to the bird. "You look as if you were made with a jack-knife." The cook and the correspondent swore darkly at the creature. The captain naturally wished to knock it away with the end of the heavy painter; but he did not dare do it, because anything resembling an emphatic gesture would have capsized this freighted boat, and so with his open hand, the captain gently and carefully waved the gull away. After it had been discouraged from the pursuit the captain breathed easier on account of his hair, and others breathed easier because the bird struck their minds at this time as being somehow grewsome and ominous.

In the meantime the oiler and the correspondent rowed And also they rowed.

They sat together in the same seat, and each rowed an oar. Then the oiler took both oars; then the correspondent took both oars; then the oiler; then the correspondent. They rowed and they rowed. The very ticklish part of the business was when the time came for the reclining one in the stern to take his turn at the oars. By the very last star of truth, it is easier to steal eggs from under a hen than it was to change seats in the dingey. First the man in the stern slid his hand along the thwart and moved with care, as if he were of Svres. Then the man in the rowing seat slid his hand along the other thwart. It was all done with most extraordinary care. As the two sidled past each other, the whole party kept watchful eyes on the coming wave, and the captain cried: "Look out now! Steady there!"

The brown mats of seaweed that appeared from time to time were like islands, bits of earth. They were traveling, apparently, neither one way nor the other. They were, to all intents, stationary. They informed the men in the boat that it was making progress slowly toward the land.

The captain, rearing cautiously in the bow, after the dingey soared on a great swell, said that he had seen the light-house at Mosquito Inlet. Presently the cook remarked that he had seen it. The correspondent was at the oars then, and for some reason he too wished to look at the lighthouse, but his back was toward the far shore and the waves were important, and for some time he could not seize an opportunity to turn his head. But at last there came a wave more gentle than the others, and when at the crest of it he swiftly scoured the western horizon.

"See it?" said the captain.

"No," said the correspondent slowly, "I didn't see anything."

"Look again," said the captain. He pointed. "It's exactly in that direction."

At the top of another wave, the correspondent did as he was bid, and this time his eyes chanced on a small still thing on the edge of the swaying horizon. It was precisely like the point of a pin. It took an anxious eye to find a light house so tiny.

"Think we'll make it, captain?"

"If this wind holds and the boat don't swamp, we can't do much else," said the captain.

The little boat, lifted by each towering sea, and splashed viciously by the crests, made progress that in the absence of seaweed was not apparent to those in her. She seemed just a wee thing wallowing, miraculously top-up, at the mercy of five oceans. Occasionally, a great spread of water, like white flames, swarmed into her.

"Bail her, cook," said the captain serenely.

"All right, captain," said the cheerful cook.
III
It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common. The hurt captain, lying against the water-jar in the bow, spoke always in a low voice and calmly, but he could never command a more ready and swiftly obedient crew than the motley three of the dingey. It was more than a mere recognition of what was best for the common safety. There was surely in it a quality that was personal and heartfelt. And after this devotion to the commander of the boat there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life. But no one said that it was so. No one mentioned it.

"I wish we had a sail," remarked the captain. "We might try my overcoat on the end of an oar and give you two boys a chance to rest." So the cook and the correspondent held the mast and spread wide the overcoat. The oiler steered, and the little boat made good way with her new rig. Sometimes the oiler had to scull sharply to keep a sea from breaking into the boat, but otherwise sailing was a success.

Meanwhile the lighthouse had been growing slowly larger. It had now almost assumed color, and appeared like a little grey shadow on the sky. The man at the oars could not be prevented from turning his head rather often to try for a glimpse of this little grey shadow.

At last, from the top of each wave the men in the tossing boat could see land. Even as the lighthouse was an upright shadow on the sky, this land seemed but a long black shadow on the sea. It certainly was thinner than paper. "We must be about opposite New Smyrna," said the cook, who had coasted this shore often in schooners. "Captain, by the way, I believe they abandoned that life-saving station there about a year ago."

"Did they?" said the captain.

The wind slowly died away. The cook and the correspondent were not now obliged to slave in order to hold high the oar. But the waves continued their old impetuous swooping at the dingey, and the little craft, no longer under way, struggled woundily over them. The oiler or the correspondent took the oars again.

Shipwrecks are _ propos_ of nothing. If men could only train for them and have them occur when the men had reached pink condition, there would be less drowning at sea. Of the four in the dingey none had slept any time worth mentioning for two days and two nights previous to embarking in the dingey, and in the excitement of clambering about the deck of a foundering ship they had also forgotten to eat heartily.

For these reasons, and for others, neither the oiler nor the correspondent was fond of rowing at this time. The correspondent wondered ingenuously how in the name of all that was sane could there be people who thought it amusing to row a boat. It was not an amusement; it was a diabolical punishment, and even a genius of mental aberrations could never conclude that it was anything but a horror to the muscles and a crime against the back. He mentioned to the boat in general how the amusement of rowing struck him, and the weary-faced oiler smiled in full sympathy. Previously to the foundering, by the way, the oiler had worked double-watch in the engine-room of the ship.

"Take her easy, now, boys," said the captain. "Don't spend yourselves. If we have to run a surf you'll need all your strength, because we'll sure have to swim for it. Take your time."

Slowly the land arose from the sea. From a black line it became a line of black and a line of white, trees and sand. Finally, the captain said that he could make out a house on the shore. "That's the house of refuge, sure," said the cook. "They'll see us before long, and come out after us."

The distant lighthouse reared high. "The keeper ought to be able to make us out now, if he's looking through a glass," said the captain. "He'll notify the life-saving people."

"None of those other boats could have got ashore to give word of the wreck," said the oiler, in a low voice. "Else the lifeboat would be out hunting us."

Slowly and beautifully the land loomed out of the sea. The wind came again. It had veered from the north-east to the south-east. Finally, a new sound struck the ears of the men in the boat. It was the low thunder of the surf on the shore. "We'll never be able to make the lighthouse now," said the captain. "Swing her head a little more north, Billie," said he.

"'A little more north,' sir," said the oiler.

Whereupon the little boat turned her nose once more down the wind, and all but the oarsman watched the shore grow. Under the influence of this expansion doubt and direful apprehension was leaving the minds of the men. The management of the boat was still most absorbing, but it could not prevent a quiet cheerfulness. In an hour, perhaps, they would be ashore.

Their backbones had become thoroughly used to balancing in the boat, and they now rode this wild colt of a dingey like circus men. The correspondent thought that he had been drenched to the skin, but happening to feel in the top pocket of his coat, he found therein eight cigars. Four of them were soaked with sea-water; four were perfectly scathless. After a search, somebody produced three dry matches, and thereupon the four waifs rode impudently in their little boat, and with an assurance of an impending rescue shining in their eyes, puffed at the big cigars and judged well and ill of all men. Everybody took a drink of water.
IV
"Cook," remarked the captain, "there don't seem to be any signs of life about your house of refuge."

"No," replied the cook. "Funny they don't see us!"

A broad stretch of lowly coast lay before the eyes of the men. It was of dunes topped with dark vegetation. The roar of the surf was plain, and sometimes they could see the white lip of a wave as it spun up the beach. A tiny house was blocked out black upon the sky. Southward, the slim lighthouse lifted its little grey length.

Tide, wind, and waves were swinging the dingey northward. "Funny they don't see us," said the men.

The surf's roar was here dulled, but its tone was, nevertheless, thunderous and mighty. As the boat swam over the great rollers, the men sat listening to this roar. "We'll swamp sure," said everybody.

It is fair to say here that there was not a life-saving station within twenty miles in either direction, but the men did not know this fact, and in consequence they made dark and opprobrious remarks concerning the eyesight of the nation's life-savers. Four scowling men sat in the dingey and surpassed records in the invention of epithets.

"Funny they don't see us."

The lightheartedness of a former time had completely faded. To their sharpened minds it was easy to conjure pictures of all kinds of incompetency and blindness and, indeed, cowardice. There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign.

"Well," said the captain, ultimately, "I suppose we'll have to make a try for ourselves. If we stay out here too long, we'll none of us have strength left to swim after the boat swamps."

And so the oiler, who was at the oars, turned the boat straight for the shore. There was a sudden tightening of muscle. There was some thinking.

"If we don't all get ashore--" said the captain. "If we don't all get ashore, I suppose you fellows know where to send news of my finish?"

They then briefly exchanged some addresses and admonitions. As for the reflections of the men, there was a great deal of rage in them. Perchance they might be formulated thus: "If I am going to be drowned-- if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous. If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men's fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble? The whole affair is absurd.... But no, she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work." Afterward the man might have had an impulse to shake his fist at the clouds: "Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!"

The billows that came at this time were more formidable. They seemed always just about to break and roll over the little boat in a turmoil of foam. There was a preparatory and long growl in the speech of them. No mind unused to the sea would have concluded that the dingey could ascend these sheer heights in time. The shore was still afar. The oiler was a wily surfman. "Boys," he said swiftly, "she won't live three minutes more, and we're too far out to swim. Shall I take her to sea again, captain?"

"Yes! Go ahead!" said the captain.

This oiler, by a series of quick miracles, and fast and steady oarsmanship, turned the boat in the middle of the surf and took her safely to sea again.

There was a considerable silence as the boat bumped over the furrowed sea to deeper water. Then somebody in gloom spoke. "Well, anyhow, they must have seen us from the shore by now."

The gulls went in slanting flight up the wind toward the grey desolate east. A squall, marked by dingy clouds, and clouds brick-red, like smoke from a burning building, appeared from the south-east.

"What do you think of those life-saving people? Ain't they peaches?'

"Funny they haven't seen us."

"Maybe they think we're out here for sport! Maybe they think we're fishin'. Maybe they think we're damned fools."

It was a long afternoon. A changed tide tried to force them southward, but the wind and wave said northward. Far ahead, where coast-line, sea, and sky formed their mighty angle, there were little dots which seemed to indicate a city on the shore.

"St. Augustine?"

The captain shook his head. "Too near Mosquito Inlet."

And the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed. Then the oiler rowed. It was a weary business. The human back can become the seat of more aches and pains than are registered in books for the composite anatomy of a regiment. It is a limited area, but it can become the theatre of innumerable muscular conflicts, tangles, wrenches, knots, and other comforts.

"Did you ever like to row, Billie?" asked the correspondent.

"No," said the oiler. "Hang it!"

When one exchanged the rowing-seat for a place in the bottom of the boat, he suffered a bodily depression that caused him to be careless of everything save an obligation to wiggle one finger. There was cold sea- water swashing to and fro in the boat, and he lay in it. His head, pillowed on a thwart, was within an inch of the swirl of a wave crest, and sometimes a particularly obstreperous sea came in-board and drenched him once more. But these matters did not annoy him. It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure that it was a great soft mattress.

"Look! There's a man on the shore!"

"Where?"

"There! See 'im? See 'im?"

"Yes, sure! He's walking along."

"Now he's stopped. Look! He's facing us!"

"He's waving at us!"

"So he is! By thunder!"

"Ah, now we're all right! Now we're all right! There'll be a boat out here for us in half-an-hour."

"He's going on. He's running. He's going up to that house there."

The remote beach seemed lower than the sea, and it required a searching glance to discern the little black figure. The captain saw a floating stick and they rowed to it. A bath-towel was by some weird chance in the boat, and, tying this on the stick, the captain waved it. The oarsman did not dare turn his head, so he was obliged to ask questions.

"What's he doing now?"

"He's standing still again. He's looking, I think.... There he goes again. Toward the house.... Now he's stopped again."

"Is he waving at us?"

"No, not now! he was, though."

"Look! There comes another man!"

"He's running."

"Look at him go, would you."

"Why, he's on a bicycle. Now he's met the other man. They're both waving at us. Look!"

"There comes something up the beach."

"What the devil is that thing?"

"Why it looks like a boat."

"Why, certainly it's a boat."

"No, it's on wheels."

"Yes, so it is. Well, that must be the life-boat. They drag them along shore on a wagon."

"That's the life-boat, sure."

"No, by ----, it's--it's an omnibus."

"I tell you it's a life-boat."

"It is not! It's an omnibus. I can see it plain. See? One of these big hotel omnibuses."

"By thunder, you're right. It's an omnibus, sure as fate. What do you suppose they are doing with an omnibus? Maybe they are going around collecting the life-crew, hey?"

"That's it, likely. Look! There's a fellow waving a little black flag. He's standing on the steps of the omnibus. There come those other two fellows. Now they're all talking together. Look at the fellow with the flag. Maybe he ain't waving it."

"That ain't a flag, is it? That's his coat. Why, certainly, that's his coat."

"So it is. It's his coat. He's taken it off and is waving it around his head. But would you look at him swing it."

"Oh, say, there isn't any life-saving station there. That's just a winter resort hotel omnibus that has brought over some of the boarders to see us drown."

"What's that idiot with the coat mean? What's he signaling, anyhow?"

"It looks as if he were trying to tell us to go north. There must be a life-saving station up there."

"No! He thinks we're fishing. Just giving us a merry hand. See? Ah, there, Willie!"

"Well, I wish I could make something out of those signals. What do you suppose he means?"

"He don't mean anything. He's just playing."

"Well, if he'd just signal us to try the surf again, or to go to sea and wait, or go north, or go south, or go to hell--there would be some reason in it. But look at him. He just stands there and keeps his coat revolving like a wheel. The ass!"

"There come more people."

"Now there's quite a mob. Look! Isn't that a boat?"

"Where? Oh, I see where you mean. No, that's no boat."

"That fellow is still waving his coat."

"He must think we like to see him do that. Why don't he quit it? It don't mean anything."

"I don't know. I think he is trying to make us go north. It must be that there's a life-saving station there somewhere."

"Say, he ain't tired yet. Look at 'im wave."

"Wonder how long he can keep that up. He's been revolving his coat ever since he caught sight of us. He's an idiot. Why aren't they getting men to bring a boat out? A fishing boat--one of those big yawls--could come out here all right. Why don't he do something?"

"Oh, it's all right, now."

"They'll have a boat out here for us in less than no time, now that they've seen us."

A faint yellow tone came into the sky over the low land. The shadows on the sea slowly deepened. The wind bore coldness with it, and the men began to shiver.

"Holy smoke!" said one, allowing his voice to express his impious mood, "if we keep on monkeying out here! If we've got to flounder out here all night!"

"Oh, we'll never have to stay here all night! Don't you worry. They've seen us now, and it won't be long before they'll come chasing out after us."

The shore grew dusky. The man waving a coat blended gradually into this gloom, and it swallowed in the same manner the omnibus and the group of people. The spray, when it dashed uproariously over the side, made the voyagers shrink and swear like men who were being branded.

"I'd like to catch the chump who waved the coat. I feel like soaking him one, just for luck."

"Why? What did he do?"

"Oh, nothing, but then he seemed so damned cheerful."

In the meantime the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed, and then the oiler rowed. Grey-faced and bowed forward, they mechanically, turn by turn, plied the leaden oars. The form of the lighthouse had vanished from the southern horizon, but finally a pale star appeared, just lifting from the sea. The streaked saffron in the west passed before the all-merging darkness, and the sea to the east was black. The land had vanished, and was expressed only by the low and drear thunder of the surf.

"If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?"

The patient captain, drooped over the water-jar, was sometimes obliged to speak to the oarsman.

"Keep her head up! Keep her head up!"

"'Keep her head up,' sir." The voices were weary and low.

This was surely a quiet evening. All save the oarsman lay heavily and listlessly in the boat's bottom. As for him, his eyes were just capable of noting the tall black waves that swept forward in a most sinister silence, save for an occasional subdued growl of a crest.

The cook's head was on a thwart, and he looked without interest at the water under his nose. He was deep in other scenes. Finally he spoke. "Billie," he murmured, dreamfully, "what kind of pie do you like best?"
V
"Pie," said the oiler and the correspondent, agitatedly. "Don't talk about those things, blast you!"

"Well," said the cook, "I was just thinking about ham sandwiches, and--"

A night on the sea in an open boat is a long night. As darkness settled finally, the shine of the light, lifting from the sea in the south, changed to full gold. On the northern horizon a new light appeared, a small bluish gleam on the edge of the waters. These two lights were the furniture of the world. Otherwise there was nothing but waves.

Two men huddled in the stern, and distances were so magnificent in the dingey that the rower was enabled to keep his feet partly warmed by thrusting them under his companions. Their legs indeed extended far under the rowing-seat until they touched the feet of the captain forward. Sometimes, despite the efforts of the tired oarsman, a wave came piling into the boat, an icy wave of the night, and the chilling water soaked them anew. They would twist their bodies for a moment and groan, and sleep the dead sleep once more, while the water in the boat gurgled about them as the craft rocked.

The plan of the oiler and the correspondent was for one to row until he lost the ability, and then arouse the other from his sea-water couch in the bottom of the boat.

The oiler plied the oars until his head drooped forward, and the overpowering sleep blinded him. And he rowed yet afterward. Then he touched a man in the bottom of the boat, and called his name. "Will you spell me for a little while?" he said, meekly.

"Sure, Billie," said the correspondent, awakening and dragging himself to a sitting position. They exchanged places carefully, and the oiler, cuddling down in the sea-water at the cook's side, seemed to go to sleep instantly.

The particular violence of the sea had ceased. The waves came without snarling. The obligation of the man at the oars was to keep the boat headed so that the tilt of the rollers would not capsize her, and to preserve her from filling when the crests rushed past. The black waves were silent and hard to be seen in the darkness. Often one was almost upon the boat before the oarsman was aware.

In a low voice the correspondent addressed the captain. He was not sure that the captain was awake, although this iron man seemed to be always awake. "Captain, shall I keep her making for that light north, sir?"

The same steady voice answered him. "Yes. Keep it about two points off the port bow."

The cook had tied a life-belt around himself in order to get even the warmth which this clumsy cork contrivance could donate, and he seemed almost stove-like when a rower, whose teeth invariably chattered wildly as soon as he ceased his labor, dropped down to sleep.

The correspondent, as he rowed, looked down at the two men sleeping under-foot. The cook's arm was around the oiler's shoulders, and, with their fragmentary clothing and haggard faces, they were the babes of the sea, a grotesque rendering of the old babes in the wood.

Later he must have grown stupid at his work, for suddenly there was a growling of water, and a crest came with a roar and a swash into the boat, and it was a wonder that it did not set the cook afloat in his life-belt. The cook continued to sleep, but the oiler sat up, blinking his eyes and shaking with the new cold.

"Oh, I'm awful sorry, Billie," said the correspondent contritely.

"That's all right, old boy," said the oiler, and lay down again and was asleep.

Presently it seemed that even the captain dozed, and the correspondent thought that he was the one man afloat on all the oceans. The wind had a voice as it came over the waves, and it was sadder than the end.

There was a long, loud swishing astern of the boat, and a gleaming trail of phosphorescence, like blue flame, was furrowed on the black waters. It might have been made by a monstrous knife.

Then there came a stillness, while the correspondent breathed with the open mouth and looked at the sea.

Suddenly there was another swish and another long flash of bluish light, and this time it was alongside the boat, and might almost have been reached with an oar. The correspondent saw an enormous fin speed like a shadow through the water, hurling the crystalline spray and leaving the long glowing trail.

The correspondent looked over his shoulder at the captain. His face was hidden, and he seemed to be asleep. He looked at the babes of the sea. They certainly were asleep. So, being bereft of sympathy, he leaned a little way to one side and swore softly into the sea.

But the thing did not then leave the vicinity of the boat. Ahead or astern, on one side or the other, at intervals long or short, fled the long sparkling streak, and there was to be heard the whirroo of the dark fin. The speed and power of the thing was greatly to be admired. It cut the water like a gigantic and keen projectile.

The presence of this biding thing did not affect the man with the same horror that it would if he had been a picnicker. He simply looked at the sea dully and swore in an undertone.

Nevertheless, it is true that he did not wish to be alone. He wished one of his companions to awaken by chance and keep him company with it. But the captain hung motionless over the water-jar, and the oiler and the cook in the bottom of the boat were plunged in slumber.
VI
"If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?"

During this dismal night, it may be remarked that a man would conclude that it was really the intention of the seven mad gods to drown him, despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still--

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no brick and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself."

A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

The men in the dingey had not discussed these matters, but each had, no doubt, reflected upon them in silence and according to his mind. There was seldom any expression upon their faces save the general one of complete weariness. Speech was devoted to the business of the boat.

To chime the notes of his emotion, a verse mysteriously entered the correspondent's head. He had even forgotten that he had forgotten this verse, but it suddenly was in his mind.

"A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, There was a lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's tears; But a comrade stood beside him, and he took that comrade's hand, And he said: 'I shall never see my own, my native land.'"

In his childhood, the correspondent had been made acquainted with the fact that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, but he had never regarded the fact as important. Myriads of his school-fellows had informed him of the soldier's plight, but the dinning had naturally ended by making him perfectly indifferent. He had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than the breaking of a pencil's point.

Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality--stern, mournful, and fine.

The correspondent plainly saw the soldier. He lay on the sand with his feet out straight and still. While his pale left hand was upon his chest in an attempt to thwart the going of his life, the blood came between his fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers.

The thing which had followed the boat and waited, had evidently grown bored at the delay. There was no longer to be heard the slash of the cut-water, and there was no longer the flame of the long trail. The light in the north still glimmered, but it was apparently no nearer to the boat. Sometimes the boom of the surf rang in the correspondent's ears, and he turned the craft seaward then and rowed harder. Southward, some one had evidently built a watch-fire on the beach. It was too low and too far to be seen, but it made a shimmering, roseate reflection upon the bluff back of it, and this could be discerned from the boat. The wind came stronger, and sometimes a wave suddenly raged out like a mountain-cat, and there was to be seen the sheen and sparkle of a broken crest.

The captain, in the bow, moved on his water-jar and sat erect. "Pretty long night," he observed to the correspondent. He looked at the shore. "Those life-saving people take their time."

"Did you see that shark playing around?"

"Yes, I saw him. He was a big fellow, all right."

"Wish I had known you were awake."

Later the correspondent spoke into the bottom of the boat.

"Billie!" There was a slow and gradual disentanglement. "Billie, will you spell me?"

"Sure," said the oiler.

As soon as the correspondent touched the cold comfortable sea-water in the bottom of the boat, and had huddled close to the cook's life-belt he was deep in sleep, despite the fact that his teeth played all the popular airs. This sleep was so good to him that it was but a moment before he heard a voice call his name in a tone that demonstrated the last stages of exhaustion. "Will you spell me?"

"Sure, Billie."

The light in the north had mysteriously vanished, but the correspondent took his course from the wide-awake captain.

Later in the night they took the boat farther out to sea, and the captain directed the cook to take one oar at the stern and keep the boat facing the seas. He was to call out if he should hear the thunder of the surf. This plan enabled the oiler and the correspondent to get respite together. "We'll give those boys a chance to get into shape again," said the captain. They curled down and, after a few preliminary chatterings and trembles, slept once more the dead sleep. Neither knew they had bequeathed to the cook the company of another shark, or perhaps the same shark.

As the boat caroused on the waves, spray occasionally bumped over the side and gave them a fresh soaking, but this had no power to break their repose. The ominous slash of the wind and the water affected them as it would have affected mummies.

"Boys," said the cook, with the notes of every reluctance in his voice, "she's drifted in pretty close. I guess one of you had better take her to sea again." The correspondent, aroused, heard the crash of the toppled crests.

As he was rowing, the captain gave him some whisky-and-water, and this steadied the chills out of him. "If I ever get ashore and anybody shows me even a photograph of an oar--"

At last there was a short conversation.

"Billie.... Billie, will you spell me?"

"Sure," said the oiler.
VII
When the correspondent again opened his eyes, the sea and the sky were each of the grey hue of the dawning. Later, carmine and gold was painted upon the waters. The morning appeared finally, in its splendor, with a sky of pure blue, and the sunlight flamed on the tips of the waves.

On the distant dunes were set many little black cottages, and a tall white windmill reared above them. No man, nor dog, nor bicycle appeared on the beach. The cottages might have formed a deserted village.

The voyagers scanned the shore. A conference was held in the boat. "Well," said the captain, "if no help is coming we might better try a run through the surf right away. If we stay out here much longer we will be too weak to do anything for ourselves at all." The others silently acquiesced in this reasoning. The boat was headed for the beach. The correspondent wondered if none ever ascended the tall wind-tower, and if then they never looked seaward. This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws of his life, and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him, then, in this new ignorance of the grave-edge, and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction or at a tea.

"Now, boys," said the captain, "she is going to swamp, sure. All we can do is to work her in as far as possible, and then when she swamps, pile out and scramble for the beach. Keep cool now, and don't jump until she swamps sure."

The oiler took the oars. Over his shoulders he scanned the surf. "Captain," he said, "I think I'd better bring her about, and keep her head-on to the seas and back her in."

"All right, Billie," said the captain. "Back her in." The oiler swung the boat then and, seated in the stern, the cook and the correspondent were obliged to look over their shoulders to contemplate the lonely and indifferent shore.

The monstrous in-shore rollers heaved the boat high until the men were again enabled to see the white sheets of water scudding up the slanted beach. "We won't get in very close," said the captain. Each time a man could wrest his attention from the rollers, he turned his glance toward the shore, and in the expression of the eyes during this contemplation there was a singular quality. The correspondent, observing the others, knew that they were not afraid, but the full meaning of their glances was shrouded.

As for himself, he was too tired to grapple fundamentally with the fact. He tried to coerce his mind into thinking of it, but the mind was dominated at this time by the muscles, and the muscles said they did not care. It merely occurred to him that if he should drown it would be a shame.

There were no hurried words, no pallor, no plain agitation. The men simply looked at the shore. "Now, remember to get well clear of the boat when you jump," said the captain.

Seaward the crest of a roller suddenly fell with a thunderous crash, and the long white comber came roaring down upon the boat.

"Steady now," said the captain. The men were silent. They turned their eyes from the shore to the comber and waited. The boat slid up the incline, leaped at the furious top, bounced over it, and swung down the long back of the wave. Some water had been shipped and the cook bailed it out.

But the next crest crashed also. The tumbling, boiling flood of white water caught the boat and whirled it almost perpendicular. Water swarmed in from all sides. The correspondent had his hands on the gunwale at this time, and when the water entered at that place he swiftly withdrew his fingers, as if he objected to wetting them.

The little boat, drunken with this weight of water, reeled and snuggled deeper into the sea.

"Bail her out, cook! Bail her out," said the captain.

"All right, captain," said the cook.

"Now, boys, the next one will do for us, sure," said the oiler. "Mind to jump clear of the boat."

The third wave moved forward, huge, furious, implacable. It fairly swallowed the dingey, and almost simultaneously the men tumbled into the sea. A piece of lifebelt had lain in the bottom of the boat, and as the correspondent went overboard he held this to his chest with his left hand.

The January water was icy, and he reflected immediately that it was colder than he had expected to find it on the coast of Florida. This appeared to his dazed mind as a fact important enough to be noted at the time. The coldness of the water was sad; it was tragic. This fact was somehow so mixed and confused with his opinion of his own situation that it seemed almost a proper reason for tears. The water was cold.

When he came to the surface he was conscious of little but the noisy water. Afterward he saw his companions in the sea. The oiler was ahead in the race. He was swimming strongly and rapidly. Off to the correspondent's left, the cook's great white and corked back bulged out of the water, and in the rear the captain was hanging with his one good hand to the keel of the overturned dingey.

There is a certain immovable quality to a shore, and the correspondent wondered at it amid the confusion of the sea.

It seemed also very attractive, but the correspondent knew that it was a long journey, and he paddled leisurely. The piece of life-preserver lay under him, and sometimes he whirled down the incline of a wave as if he were on a handsled.

But finally he arrived at a place in the sea where travel was beset with difficulty. He did not pause swimming to inquire what manner of current had caught him, but there his progress ceased. The shore was set before him like a bit of scenery on a stage, and he looked at it and understood with his eyes each detail of it.

As the cook passed, much farther to the left, the captain was calling to him, "Turn over on your back, cook! Turn over on your back and use the oar."

"All right, sir." The cook turned on his back, and, paddling with an oar, went ahead as if he were a canoe.

Presently the boat also passed to the left of the correspondent with the captain clinging with one hand to the keel. He would have appeared like a man raising himself to look over a board fence, if it were not for the extraordinary gymnastics of the boat. The correspondent marvelled that the captain could still hold to it.

They passed on, nearer to shore--the oiler, the cook, the captain--and following them went the water-jar, bouncing gaily over the seas.

The correspondent remained in the grip of this strange new enemy--a current. The shore, with its white slope of sand and its green bluff, topped with little silent cottages, was spread like a picture before him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who in a gallery looks at a scene from Brittany or Holland.

He thought: "I am going to drown? Can it be possible Can it be possible? Can it be possible?" Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature.

But later a wave perhaps whirled him out of this small, deadly current, for he found suddenly that he could again make progress toward the shore. Later still, he was aware that the captain, clinging with one hand to the keel of the dingey, had his face turned away from the shore and toward him, and was calling his name. "Come to the boat! Come to the boat!"

In his struggle to reach the captain and the boat, he reflected that when one gets properly wearied, drowning must really be a comfortable arrangement, a cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree of relief, and he was glad of it, for the main thing in his mind for some months had been horror of the temporary agony. He did not wish to be hurt.

Presently he saw a man running along the shore. He was undressing with most remarkable speed. Coat, trousers, shirt, everything flew magically off him.

"Come to the boat," called the captain.

"All right, captain." As the correspondent paddled, he saw the captain let himself down to bottom and leave the boat. Then the correspondent performed his one little marvel of the voyage. A large wave caught him and flung him with ease and supreme speed completely over the boat and far beyond it. It struck him even then as an event in gymnastics, and a true miracle of the sea. An over-turned boat in the surf is not a plaything to a swimming man.

The correspondent arrived in water that reached only to his waist, but his condition did not enable him to stand for more than a moment. Each wave knocked him into a heap, and the under-tow pulled at him.

Then he saw the man who had been running and undressing, and undressing and running, come bounding into the water. He dragged ashore the cook, and then waded towards the captain, but the captain waved him away, and sent him to the correspondent. He was naked, naked as a tree in winter, but a halo was about his head, and he shone like a saint. He gave a strong pull, and a long drag, and a bully heave at the correspondent's hand. The correspondent, schooled in the minor formulae, said: "Thanks, old man." But suddenly the man cried: "What's that?" He pointed a swift finger. The correspondent said: "Go."

In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea.

The correspondent did not know all that transpired afterward. When he achieved safe ground he fell, striking the sand with each particular part of his body. It was as if he had dropped from a roof, but the thud was grateful to him.

It seems that instantly the beach was populated with men with blankets, clothes, and flasks, and women with coffeepots and all the remedies sacred to their minds. The welcome of the land to the men from the sea was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land's welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave.

When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.

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Originally published as, "Stephen Crane's Own Story" (1897), The Open Boat is based on the real-life ordeal Crane endured, when the boat he was taking to Cuba ran aground and sank off the Florida coast. Read more background on The American Literary Blog. A Tale intended to be after the fact.

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Set during the American Civil War, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek" is Bierce's most famous short story. It was first published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890. It then appeared in Bierce's 1891 collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. We encourage students and teacher to use our An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge Study Guide to learn more about the story.

Military bridge constructed over the Tennessee River, 1863

I
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners--two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as "support," that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest--a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it. Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground--a gentle acclivity topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway of the slope between the bridge and fort were the spectators--a single company of infantry in line, at "parade rest," the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.

The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good--a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.

The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his "unsteadfast footing," then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move, What a sluggish stream!

He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift--all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by--it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and--he knew not why--apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer, the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance."

As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.
II
Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with the gallant army that had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in war time. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.

One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Farquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front.

"The Yanks are repairing the railroads," said the man, "and are getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order."

"How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?" Farquhar asked.

"About thirty miles."

"Is there no force on this side the creek?"

"Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge."

"Suppose a man--a civilian and student of hanging--should elude the picket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel," said Farquhar, smiling, "what could he accomplish?"

The soldier reflected. "I was there a month ago," he replied. "I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is now dry and would burn like tow."

The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal scout.
III
As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened--ages later, it seemed to him--by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fulness--of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!--the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface--knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. "To be hanged and drowned," he thought? "that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot; that is not fair."

He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave the struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort!--what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its undulations resembling those of a water snake. "Put it back, put it back!" He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire; his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!

He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf--saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies' wings, the strokes of the water-spiders' legs, like oars which had lifted their boat--all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.

He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing at him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire; the others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque and horrible, their forms gigantic.

Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the water smartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard a second report, and saw one of the sentinels with his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from the muzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a grey eye and remembered having read that grey eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed.

A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking into the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears. Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; the lieutenant on shore was taking a part in the morning's work. How coldly and pitilessly--with what an even, calm intonation, presaging, and enforcing tranquillity in the men--with what accurately measured intervals fell those cruel words:

"Attention, company! . . Shoulder arms! . . . Ready! . . . Aim! . . . Fire!"

Farquhar dived--dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his ears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dulled thunder of the volley and, rising again toward the surface, met shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing their descent. One lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.

As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time under water; he was perceptibly farther down stream nearer to safety. The soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn from the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The two sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually.

The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms and legs; he thought with the rapidity of lightning.

The officer," he reasoned, "will not make that martinet's error a second time. It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He has probably already given the command to fire at will. God help me, I cannot dodge them all!"

An appalling splash within two yards of him was followed by a loud, rushing sound, diminuendo, which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps!

A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken a hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.

"They will not do that again," he thought; "the next time they will use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke will apprise me--the report arrives too late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun."

Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round--spinning like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men--all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color--that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In a few moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream--the southern bank--and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of olian harps. He had no wish to perfect his escape--was content to remain in that enchanting spot until retaken.

A whiz and rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest.

All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman's road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.

By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famishing. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great garden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which--once, twice, and again--he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.

His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue--he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet!

Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene--perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forward with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon--then all is darkness and silence!

Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
Shhhh! Friends don't tell friends how the story ends! That story is a great introduction to the short story writer's trick of the surprise or "twist" ending. The story is also known as "A Dead Man's Dream.", but I didn't want to tell you that until after you were finished reading it ;- ).
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is featured in our collection of Short Stories for High School I and Civil War Stories

Add An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge to your library.

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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a Short Story by Ambrose Bierce.

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The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

And nothing happened: day was all but done.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside him in her apron

To tell them 'Supper.' At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,

Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap-

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all-

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man's work, though a child at heart-

He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off-

The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!'

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then-the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little-less-nothing!-and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

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'Out, Out-' by Robert Frost | Poetry Foundation

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The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the sunset far into Vermont.

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Here are some article readings that could be beneficial in teaching death in literature.

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Here are some great statistics and facts about why to teach death in schools

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Children become aware of death from an early age. shutterstock

Have you ever thought about how you'd like your funeral to be? Or what dying might feel like? Or what should happen to your body?

If you're anything like the majority of people living in the Western world, chances are you haven't given much thought to how you'd like to die. Or even spoken much about the topic in general.

Although we all know it's going to happen, dying remains one of those things people still don't want to discuss. And in a culture that embraces and celebrates youth, very few in the West want to face up to their mortality or risk being seen as macabre or morbid.

But with an ageing population and the UK's NHS struggling to cope with demand, people need to start planning for their own end of life care earlier. Perhaps, then, the UK should follow Australia's thinking and start getting dying on the agenda early - by teaching kids about it in school.

The Australian Medical Association Queensland has proposed that death should be built into the school curriculum. If this proposal is accepted, Australia will lead many developed Western nations in tackling the public discomfort and avoidance of death.

Death education

In the UK, 70% of people wish to die at home, but 50% actually die in hospital. In Australia, only about 10% of people die at home - most die in hospital - despite the fact that the majority of Australians say they would prefer to die at home.

How people, especially the young, understand death is often heavily influenced by films and TV where it is often scarier than the reality. To try and address this issue and get people talking about death before it's too late, Australian doctors are keen to see the subject taught in classrooms. They argue that death would be less traumatic and people would be able to make more informed decisions if palliative care and euthanasia were spoken about more openly.

In practical terms, schools could easily build death into existing subjects. In biology, for example, the processes of death and dying could be covered from a practical perspective, while in citizenship, students could learn how to draw up a will and look at the legal and ethical debates over what mental and physical capacity means.

Death denial

A variety of organisations and lobbying groups are already making headway in getting people to talk more openly about death. The death cafe movement has encouraged people to talk about death and dying over tea and cake in 56 countries. The Order of the Good Death, led by mortician, author and founder Caitlin Doughty, takes an online approach to promote the idea of making death part of life. Meanwhile, the annual UK Dying Matters Awareness Week provides a programme of events supporting the vision that dying does matter and needs to be talked about.

Shutterstock

Such movements are making important inroads into challenging the public wisdom that "death is taboo". But there remains a significant proportion of people who do not want to talk about death. It is this cultural trend that embodies what death scholars refer to as "death denial".

A key problem with death denial is that individual wishes for end of life care are not considered until late on. And the result is that people struggle to achieve a good death, and often don't have their wishes considered.

Dying talk

Educating the young about death and dying, then, offers the opportunity to challenge the unwanted consequences of not talking - which, according to the Dying Matters coalition, includes the family not knowing how to best help or support their dying loved one, the dying person feeling frightened and distressed, and the issue of people dying without a will - leaving the family unsure about funeral wishes.

New efforts need to be made to demystify death and dying. And there's more to it than simply getting people to talk about death - although this is a positive step. Directly educating the younger generation is an important shift towards empowering people to understand the interplay between law, medicine and ethical issues surrounding death and dying.

By creating transparency through education, death, dying and the disposal of the dead can all become part of the everyday. And by normalising death within schools, it may well be that students can help their families to fear less and make more informed decisions about the end of their lives.

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Death: why children should be taught about it in school

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Have you ever thought about how you'd like your funeral to be? Or what dying might feel like? Or what should happen to your body? If you're anything like the majority of people living in the Western world, chances are you haven't given much thought to how you'd like to die.

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A great article on death education that has some very helpful starter questions on thinking about death

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Developing and Implementing Death Education in High Schools

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Jay D. Schvaneveldt, Developing and Implementing Death Education in High Schools, The High School Journal, Vol. 65, No. 6, 'Death' and 'Loss' Education (Mar., 1982), pp. 189-197

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This lesson plan is a little dense, and rather long. It appears to be meant for a higher level of educational discussion, so you may just want to take pieces from it.

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Although this is geared towards elementary students. Sometimes it is best to start simple with hard topics.

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Now this one I like for the purpose of getting the topic of what is dying started. It talks about what death is considered in a medical and philosophical way. If you are looking to get abstract here is a good one to look at.

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this lesson plan, students will be able to:

Identify and describe several types of death according to medical and philosophical definitions

Provide a plan for their own death, to include how they hope to address each of the types

Length

2 hours

Curriculum Standards

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.11-12.1.D

Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.11-12.2.B

Develop the topic thoroughly by selecting the most significant and relevant facts, extended definitions, concrete details, quotations, or other information and examples appropriate to the audience's knowledge of the topic.

Vocabulary

Materials

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By the end of this lesson plan, students will be able to: Identify and describe several types of death according to medical and philosophical definitions Provide a plan for their own death, to include how they hope to address each of the types 2 hours CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.11-12.1.D Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.

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Another incredibly interesting topic to breach on when it comes to death in the classroom is how it is viewed in other cultures.

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Lesson Plan: The Culture of Death and Dying
Download the Lesson Plan Jump to: OVERVIEW
In this lesson, students explore and compare cultural traditions, history and rituals associated with death and dying.

The video clips provided with this lesson are from Homegoings, a film that brings to life the beauty and grace of African-American funerals through the lens of mortician and funeral home owner Isaiah Owens. Owens introduces the rarely seen world of undertaking in the black community, where funeral rites draw on a rich palette of tradition, history and celebration.

POV offers a lending library of DVDs that you can borrow anytime during the school year FOR FREE! Get started by joining our Community Network.
OBJECTIVES
By the end of this lesson, students will:

Express views on and beliefs about death and dying

Identify similarities and differences among death rituals across cultures, religions and/or spiritual practices

Compare and contrast varied cultural perceptions and approaches toward death and dying

Relate preferences for death rituals

GRADE LEVEL
9-12
SUBJECT AREAS
Language Arts, Social Studies, Current Events

MATERIALS
(Note: all handouts are included in the PDF download)

Internet access and equipment to show the class online video

Chart paper and markers

ESTIMATED TIME NEEDED
One 50-minute class period
FILM CLIPS
Clip 1:Going Home (length 3:00)
This clip begins at 2:25 with a black and white photograph of a crowd gathered outside a funeral home. It ends at 5:25 with a woman in a white dress laughing, as she paces in front of a pew.

Clip 2: Preparing for Death -- Part 1 (length 2:40)
The clip begins at 10:53, with the image of a sign with the name Linda Williams-Miller and her date of birth but no death date. It ends at 12:48 when Redd says, "...I was showing her this top last night."

Clip 3: Preparing for Death -- Part 2 (length 0:45)
It picks up again at 14:15 when Redd says, " I know one day it's going to happen," and ends at 15:00 when Redd says," ...going home to be at peace."

Clip 4: My First Funeral (length 2:39)
The clip begins at 18:14, with Owens drawing lines in the soil, as music plays in the background. It ends at 20:53, with background music and an image of a spoon in the soil.

Clip 5: The Black Funeral Director... A Friend (length 1:29)
The clip begins at 21:37 with a black and white photo of a funeral in a house of worship, followed by Isaiah Owens' voice saying, " The black funeral director..." It ends at 23:06 with a black and white photo of a funeral.
ACTIVITY
( NOTE: Some students may not be open to talking about death and/or may have recently experienced the death of a loved one. Please be sensitive about their desire to communicate when ready.)

1. Tell students that they are going to have a conversation about death across different cultures. Read the following options and ask students to raise their hands for which option best describes their belief:

Death is passing on to a new life - it is a spiritual journey

Death is an end, not the start to an afterlife

I have a different opinion

I am undecided

2. Ask students to stand. Tell them they will move around the classroom briefly to chat with a few peers about what they believe death and dying involve. Explain that each will start by having a conversation with one other student, and then every two to three minutes each will find a new partner. The following question will drive student discussion:

Where does your belief originate? For example, is it religious? Is it connected to your family culture?

3. Tell each student to find a partner and begin chatting. Watch time; signal students to seek new partners after two to three minutes. ( NOTE: This task should last fewer than 10 minutes.)

4. Invite students to share what they discovered about their peers' perceptions of death. Record key points on chart paper, asking students to note what seems to be common among the perceptions. Draw attention to cultural perspectives.

5. Briefly describe the film Homegoings. Show Clip 1 (length 5:52), which shows an African-American funeral. Tell students that as they watch the segment, they should imagine themselves in that setting. Have them jot down the particular aspects of the death rituals that are most striking to them, whether it is attire, people's emotions, etc. Invite students to share their thoughts. Do they feel inclined to participate in the rituals?

6. Distribute the Culture of Death and Dying graphic organizer. Instruct students to reflect individually on death rituals, either from their particular cultures or those in which they have participated, those they have witnessed or those of which they are aware, and to complete the relevant sections on the graphic organizer. ( NOTE: If students are not fully aware of particular cultural practices--theirs or others'-related to death and dying, they may research specific cultures or spiritual practices. There are several resources connected to this theme in the lesson's Resources section below).

7. Divide students into small groups. Distribute a sheet of chart paper and marker to each group. Instruct group members to share their perspectives and then, as a group, outline the differences and similarities among these points of view. They can simply place these in two different columns or use a Venn diagram. ( OPTION: If time permits, have group members shift between groups to add to and/or refine the lists.) Have each group post its list, and ask the other groups to review the lists. Students as a class should compare the lists to identify all of the overlapping elements. Students can then note which of those elements Clip 1 echoes.

8. Students discuss:

What do all of the cultures, religious practices and spiritual practices that have been discussed value equally when it comes to death rituals?

Across cultures and religious/spiritual beliefs, why are death rituals as much for the living as for the dead? How must the transition be meaningful for both?

9. Show Clip 2 (length 6:39), which shows Linda Williams-Miller preparing for her funeral at Owens Funeral Home and discussing her rationale for death planning, as well as her views on dying. Ask:

How do Owens, Williams-Miller and her goddaughter negotiate the discussion of and planning for death? (NOTE: The discussion is open, light, business-oriented and practical. It is a plain-language discussion with some humor and not much sadness.)

How does Williams-Miller negotiate the reality of dying? How does planning her funeral figure into this emotional negotiation? (NOTE: Williams-Miller recognizes that the end is coming, as she has been ill. Hers is a practical approach. She wants to make sure everything is ready and that her children do not have to figure out funeral details later on. Planning helps her to prepare calmly for her inevitable demise, as well as to accept her end with dignity and comfort.)

What is your comfort level in discussions about death and dying?

10. Invite students to draw on the film and the classroom conversation about different cultural/religious/spiritual perspectives on death and dying and their personal beliefs about death to envision the most meaningful type of death or transition ritual that would benefit the living and the deceased. Have students share their ideas.
EXTENSIONS
1. Sometimes, a childhood interest turns into a lifelong career, as was the case for Isaiah Owens. In other cases, a specific event or desire leads to a professional calling. Show students Clip 3 (length 2:39), which shows Owens reenacting the "funerals" he created as a child, and have students read "Morticians Talk About What's Tough, and Why It's Almost a Calling" . Ask them to remark briefly on the experiences that Owens and Mike Parke (featured in the article) had that led them to become morticians. Then, engage students in one of the following tasks:

Students discuss people they know whose life interests or activities resulted in long-term professions in adulthood.

Students look at their current interests to determine whether those interests might drive their future career choices.

Students discuss people they know for whom an event or experience was the driving force behind a career choice.

Students identify and discuss factors that can influence career choice (friends, family, culture, media and so on). Some helpful information:

*http://www.careers.govt.nz/plan-your-career/helping-young-people-make-decisions/what-things-influence-a-young-persons-career-decisions/
*http://www.onlinecollege.org/2011/05/17/what-influences-your-career-choice/

2. Students delve into the history and current status of the funeral business in African-American communities to explore and discuss its evolution, impact and role. They particularly note the African origins of the homegoing, as well as the racial discrimination that led to the rise of the African-American funeral industry. Show students Clip 4 (length 1:29), in which Owens speaks about African Americans in the funeral business. Background sources include:

3. As the film points out, African Americans were pushed in the direction of the funeral business. In the United States, other groups of people have also found themselves in certain types of professions as a result of specific circumstances. Students research and lead presentations on the pros and cons of society "forcing" a specific livelihood on a group of people, or socio-economic conditions allowing a certain group of people to practice a livelihood or a livelihood that becomes an industry fixture within a specific community or population.
Sources of information include:

4. Death can be expensive, from the cost of a casket to the burial expenses. Assign students to explore the various aspects of the "business of dying" to determine whether the business is centered on the consumer or the money, and to identify ethical issues/concerns connected to the funeral industry. Students assume the roles of funeral business owners, small business advocates, consumers and others and debate the role and purpose of the funeral industry within a framework of ethical business. Information sources include:

5. The traditional funeral is one option at death. But, there are other types of death rituals to consider that are more personal and sometimes less expensive than standard funerals. Students explore and compare and contrast some of these alternatives, such as home funerals. Sources include:

6. Isaiah Owens is a true entrepreneur. Ask students to explore the characteristics and qualities of a successful businessperson: vision, ability to adapt business to economic times, knowledge of the consumer/community need and so on. Then, assign students to create a Top 10 List of Necessary Entrepreneurial Skills and present/share the list in an economics/business course lesson on entrepreneurship. Students might jumpstart this exploration via the PBS program These Kids Mean Business .
RESOURCES Isaiah Owens Enterprises Undertaking the Way Home: Funeral Profession Revered in Detroit Last Rites--Color Line Persists in Funeral Industry Black History Month: Hallowed ground 10 Extraordinary Burial Ceremonies from Around the World Death in Cultures Around the World Death: Cultural Traditions World Death Rituals Transition Rituals On Our Own Terms With Eyes Open Islamic Teachings on Death and Mourning
POV: Media Literacy Questions for Analyzing POV Films
This list of questions provides a useful starting point for leading rich discussions that challenge students to think critically about documentaries.
STANDARDS Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects
Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9-10 topics, texts and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11-12 topics, texts and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source.

Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) in order to make informed decisions and solve problems, evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source and noting any discrepancies among the data.

Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject.

Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.

Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person's life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.

Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.

Content Knowledge: A compilation of content standards and benchmarks for K-12 curriculum by McRel (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning).

Historical Understanding, Standard 2: Understands the historical perspective.

Behavioral Studies, Standard 1: Understands that group and cultural influences contribute to human development, identity and behavior.

Behavioral Studies, Standard 2: Understands various meanings of social group, general implications of group membership and different ways that groups function.

Language Arts, Standard 8: Uses listening and speaking strategies for different purposes.

Language Arts, Standard 9: Uses viewing skills and strategies to understand and interpret visual media.

Language Arts, Standard 10: Understands the characteristics and components of the media.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michele Israel owns Educational Writing & Consulting, where she works with large and small educational, nonprofit and media organizations to bolster products and programs. Her rich career spans more than 25 years of successful experience developing educational materials and resources, designing and facilitating training, generating communication materials and grant proposals and assisting in organizational and program development. Her long list of clients includes the Public Broadcasting Service, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, WETA Television, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, the Harm Reduction Coalition and the New York City Charter School Center.

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Lesson Plan: The Culture of Death and Dying | Homegoings | POV | PBS

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Lesson Plan: The Culture of Death and Dying Download the Lesson Plan Jump to: OVERVIEW In this lesson, students explore and compare cultural traditions, history and rituals associated with death and dying. The video clips provided with this lesson are from Homegoings, a film that brings to life the beauty and grace of African-American funerals through the lens of mortician and funeral home owner Isaiah Owens.

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This lesson plan has a great set of activities and lesson surrounding death. A great one deals with the portrayal of death in the media.

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A Fantastic Article on Death in The Classroom

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A Fantastic Article on Death in The Classroom

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A great article to gain some perspective on the reality of death in the classroom as a teacher.

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We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess - in the Ring -
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain -
We passed the Setting Sun -
-Emily Dickinson, from "Because I could not stop for Death"

I went back to work three days after my mother died unexpectedly. I didn't know what else to do. I asked my dad what I was supposed to do, but ironically he didn't know what to tell me because both his parents are still alive. It's one weird way in which I'm now older than my dad. She died on a Saturday in October, and he was at least able to suggest not to go to work on Monday. I needed someone to tell me what to do, so I stayed home Monday. I went back to work on Tuesday, though, because no one had taught me what to do when your mother dies. It was nearly two years ago, but I still remember those days after. All the 8th-grade teachers were at a training for a new poetry unit and we read the devastating poem "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard" by Kay Ryan. I cried and cried in the hallway. My friend Sunny sat next to me and put her arm around me. "Honey, you shouldn't be here," she said gently.

"It's OK," I said. "I just need a minute." I thought she meant I couldn't handle it. I could handle it, I thought.

"She was your mother. You shouldn't be here," Sunny said. "You should take that time for her." I went home and didn't come back to school for two weeks.

A week after returning to work, I had a doctor's appointment scheduled. Just a physical, and I didn't know if I was still supposed to go. I did, because, what else do you do? As I drove downtown I tried to remember what a doctor's appointment is like. Is the death of your parents part of your medical history? Does that mean I have to update my medical history? There was nowhere on the form to mark that my mother had died of a heart attack at the age of 57 on a clear, cloudless, cold October night. There was nowhere to mark that she had died in a town called Hope. There was nowhere to mark that for two weeks after, it rained without hardly stopping. The doctor came in and asked me how I was feeling and I cried in response. Her face changed and she sat down in front of me and I could tell the doctor's appointment was over and something else was happening.

"I am so so sorry," she said. "Do you want to just talk today? We don't have to do the appointment today." I nodded. We talked for nearly an hour. I didn't know doctor's appointments could be that long.

"My aunt died when I was 12," she said. "She was so young, she was only 20." She started to tear up as she remembered. "See, even now I still miss her. You know, it's hard in our culture, in American culture. My family is Filipino and in Filipino culture we take nine days to mourn. For nine days it was the family being together, grieving my aunt. We would eat together and pray and talk about my aunt, tell stories about her and cry together. Sometimes I wish American culture was more like that because we don't make any room for death here.

"Grief is like a place. Right now you're in grief. And you can't leave it. And right now it feels like it will last forever, but it won't. Over time grief will become a place outside of you. You can still go visit it, when you want to, but you don't have to be there all the time. Like right now, I'm visiting the grief about my aunt, and she died so long ago, but I don't have to stay there. It will be like that for you too, but not for a while. Right now you're in it.

"You're having trouble sleeping? Do you want to take something for it? You know it's OK that you're not sleeping, too. That time when you're awake late at night, that's time when you can remember your mom. It's OK to not sleep if you can't," she said. "It's normal to not be normal right now."

It was the best doctor's appointment I ever had. "You can come back and talk to me any time," she said. "I'm so glad you came to talk to me today." I was glad, too. She had made room for me.

A month after my mother died, a student at our school committed suicide. He was 13. My principal called me over the weekend to tell me. She told me I could take Monday off if I needed to. But I wanted to be the one to tell my students. I didn't want them to be with a substitute. I co-teach first period with another teacher and he and I sat together that morning and looked out at our sweet 6th graders and I wondered how we were supposed to tell them that their schoolmate had died. We both cried. Our students cried. For the next three days there was a crisis response team at school and a "safe room" that overflowed in the library, then beyond the library. Then it was gone. Interestingly, three days was also the length of the bereavement leave in my contract. It's as if everyone who writes the policies on crisis response and bereavement all got together and agreed that three days is enough for anyone to recover from a trauma.

Months later one of my students came up to me in the middle of class and asked if she could "just go walk around in the hall." It was an unusual request, especially for her, a normally focused and diligent student. Something about her face told me that she needed that right now and I said yes. Later that afternoon I got an email from the counselor that her father had unexpectedly died the day before. Of course she needed to go walk around the halls. She needed a lot more than that. Why was she in school? The counselor said that my student and her sister would be at school as they were trying to "keep things normal" until the end of the school year. I wrote her a sympathy card and tried to offer some stupid wisdom about writing but didn't really know what to say. It was strange to give her a card and never say these things to her in conversation. How do you write a sympathy card for your student?

* * *

A year after my mother died, the mother of one of my students also died unexpectedly. She was at school three days later. The counselor said not to talk to her about it because her family wanted to "keep things normal."

* * *

Two years ago the father of one of our students was murdered on a Friday. She was back at school on Tuesday. Her family said they wanted to "keep things normal" for her. I happened to be in a meeting with her language arts teacher the morning she came back and he wondered if he should proceed with the lesson he had planned. They were going to read an article about how most fairy tales start with the death of a father. "Are you kidding me?" I said. "Teach literally anything else!" "But they want to keep things normal, so shouldn't I just do what I'm going to do with all my other classes?" he asked. "Absolutely not, she's not normal right now," I responded. "You can't read that essay today, of all days."

On the one hand, death is normal in that it is something that happens to every single living being on earth. We teach about seasons, and how every fall the leaves die on the trees and fall down to the earth. It's as normal as the rising and setting sun. Maybe fairy tales do start with the death of a father because losing our parents is something that will happen to almost everyone.

And yet . . . when we have lost our parents, when we are left holding the heavy sagging bag of memories and love, it is not a normal day for us. This death, among all the others in the world, is our very own earthquake. It doesn't matter anymore if it's a Tuesday or Wednesday or Saturday. It doesn't matter if it's the end of the fiscal year or the school year or summer. It's time outside of time.

* * *

We don't stop for death in U.S. culture, and we don't make room for it in our classrooms. And when we don't make room for it at school we are teaching students that it shouldn't have room in our lives. There is no room for death here, we tell them, as we march forward with our curriculum, as we give them the test anyway because it's Friday, as we read the sad poem anyway. We teach them that grief is a secret place we're supposed to go visit by ourselves, and not for too long. It's a secret place we sneak off to, crying in bathrooms, in hallways, on the way to work and trying to fix our makeup before we walk back through the doors. It's private and we don't talk about it. When it comes out, tears seeping out of our eyes at the staff meeting or in front of the class, we apologize. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cry." The way we treat death says loudly: "Your grief is a private affair." "Take a break in the hallway and come back when you're ready - but don't you bring that death in here."

Maybe it's because our schools were built on the factory model. Factories and production plants are loath to ever shut down because the cost to the loss of production, from the lost time it takes to turn the machines off and then on again, just isn't worth it - from the standpoint of those who own the machines.

Oregon has one of the shortest school years in the country. I watch our building administrators agonize over taking a minute from passing time to add a minute to each class period, and teachers are encouraged to teach bell to bell. Is this what we've become? Production plants punching out grades like time cards, our students always switched on, always working, because any time to shut down is a loss in production. Is death the wrench in the machine that we refuse to shut down for?

And aren't teachers supposed to have all the answers? Isn't school the place we go to wrap it all up and figure it all out? But there's simply no way to wrap anything around the cosmic force of death and loss. There is no right answer or rubric or guide. There's no procedure or protocol or process to follow. Death, the limitless, unfathomable, and unknown, defies our systemic belief that we can measure understanding of the world by test scores, right answers, benchmarks, and grades.

Easier to avoid such unpleasant unanswerables altogether.

A year after our student committed suicide, district leaders forbid us from having any sort of public acknowledgement of the student because the experts said it would increase the risk of copycat suicides. So we marched through that whole week of school pretending that everything was normal, while we all felt this gaping and throbbing wound. We had an opportunity to teach our students about grief, but instead we again taught them that there is no room for that here.

One of the things I wondered about after my mom died was when I would feel normal again. "About two years," my cousin said. "That's how long it took me to start feeling normal again after my brother died. But you know, it's not the same normal."

Two years. But I tried to go back to work three days later. My students are back in my classroom the next day. Three days is the most time we get for a crisis response team in response to a suicide, and then it's "back to normal." When will we stop for death?

A little over a year after my mom died, I played an icebreaker game (two truths and a lie) with some of my classes after starting a new semester. "I hate pickles, I broke my femur when I was in middle school, and my father made this ring for my mother," I told them.

"That's the lie!" said Kaden.

"No, that part is actually true. My dad used to be a goldsmith and he made this for her."

"Wow, is it real diamonds? Can I see it?" Isaiah asked.

"Sure." I pulled it off and handed it to him. For one split second my mind worried about handing it to him. What if he dropped it and it rolled under something? But my heart told me he would be careful. "Yes, it's a real diamond, my great-grandmother's diamond, and real gold."

"But why do you have it if your dad made it for your mom?"

"Because my mom died last year. And then my dad gave it to me. And now I wear it to remember her." I teared up but didn't hide it this time.

I want to find ways to bring death in, to stop the machines for a minute or two, to have our time outside of time for those who we love. Maybe we'll write them poems, or bring in their pictures, or make a dedication board. Whatever it is we do, we have to find time to stop for death.

Katy Alexander (katy.m.alexander@gmail.com) is a special education teacher in Portland, Oregon.

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From Rethinking Schools: Making Room for Death

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We passed the School, where Children stroveAt Recess - in the Ring - We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain - We passed the Setting Sun - -Emily Dickinson, from "Because I could not stop for Death" I went back to work three days after my mother died unexpectedly.

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Due to this being a fairly recent , there  are very few teaching resources directly dealing with the book itself. Here is a resource that very basically deal with the novel.

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