Extra Credit

All three stories are examples of the author "facing the dragon."  All the stories subject matter are tough subjects for the authors to speak out about without directly saying what they were feeling.  The running theme in these choices of writing is guilt;  in each story the authors write about a great sense of guilt for their actions.

In "Landlines" the author writes about a creep pedophile who stalked and preyed on teenage girls at the mall however the author takes responsibility for the interaction between Stevie the pedophile because the game she would play with her clique of girl friends.  When Stevie then contacts her at her home land-line she overwhelmed with fear and guilt.  I think the topic might have been hard for the author to face but I think the story is more then just her guilt of interacting with Stevie.  I also think the story is the naivety of teenage girls and the pressures adolescents place on each other to be cool.  I think this was expressed a lot in the line, "We didn't want to be virgins, so we feigned a loose coolness about sex, and in those moments when we listened to Stevie describe his always-hard penis, we also looked at one another closely, a who'll-flinch-first test teen girls are terrifyingly good at."

"I remain very sorry for what I did to the little black cat" is very straight forward about the guilt expressed in the story.  The delicate word choices used to describe the innocence of the kitten made the guilt felt by the author so much more powerful.  However, the story is so much more then the unethically thing this girl did to the kitten.  A quickly developing  preteen mimicking what she once saw, but was not supposed to remember, her mother do to the family cat.  The dragon faced here is a flash back of woman recalling unresolved emotions of being a young girl dealing with her once present but now absent mother.

"Carolina/ Tennessee" is the classic remorse, guilt, shame and emptiness felt by being the "other woman" in a married man's affair.  She never writes straight forward that she saddened and ashamed but the details in her actions described reveals the dragon she is really facing by carrying on this affair and I think the last line of the story sums it but very well, " I'm not going to Newport. Instead, I'll sit here until my cigarette ash sinks through my skit, smolders and lights, burns me up under this tree in South Carolina, until I am nothing but char on the bark."