Zahraa's Short Story Blog

  (The Things They Carried, reimagined from the perspective of Ted Lavender) Boom-down, he said. Like cement.  I watched curiously as Kiowa described my death, a death which I had no memory of. I glanced over at the hollow faces of my fellow soldiers. They looked more dead than I felt. It’s a strange feeling, to be conscious but not alive, to see your own body on the ground with a bullet through it. Strange, but not frightening as one might expect it to be. It feels … light.  I’m not sure why I’m still here. My body has left for home, yet I remain with my platoon. I guess a part of me feels like I can’t leave. At least not yet, not until it’s over and I know that they’re safe. As I watched them move forward, I felt a bit of the weight I once carried return to me. Although this time it felt different, because I didn’t feel the strain on my back, I felt it in my soul. The lightness I had felt earlier was the release of the weight of my life, but as I watched the other soldi...

  “Your real mother - the one who looks like you, the one who has to love you because she grew you from her own body, the one who hates you so much that she dumped you in garbage for white people to pick up and dust off.” (Kim 63; 443) This sentence from Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying highlights the complex feelings that Mini, Ronnie, and Caroline hold towards their families and identities. Although it's a line said by the narrator, this sentence communicates how the girls feel about their birth mothers, their adoptive families, and the confused relationships they have with their identities as Korean girls with white families. The ideas conveyed in this sentence also help explain the relationship that the girls end up having with Mom and what ultimately drives Ronnie to allow Mom to possess her at the end of the story.  There are two distinct emotions expressed in the first and second halves of this sentence, which are displayed in the way the nar...

  Part IV The Return Millenniums after the collapse of the Machine, humanity had begun to rebuild itself. The homeless who survived the collapse went on to redevelop society, finally escaping the grasp of the Machine. In the minds of the Homeless, The Machine was perceived as the antithesis of a benevolent deity, a truly satanic creation. During the era of the Machine, there existed an obsession with control that no longer permeated society. In fact, the opposite became true. People became wary of any sort of technological advancements and attempted to maintain a primitive society. In doing so, they did not maintain the histories of the past. At the restart of humanity, knowledge was rarely recorded, especially information about the Machine, which became a taboo topic only mentioned in hushed whispers. The goal the Homeless had in mind was to prevent the revival of the Machine. As time went on, the Machine’s existence faded from the minds of the people.  With nothing concrete ...