"The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros

Rachel shouts, You got quite a load there too. She is very sassy.

The nose of that yellow Cadillac was all pleated like an alligator’s, and except for a bloody lip and a bruised forehead, Louie’s cousin was okay.

She is the one who told us how Davey the Baby’s sister got pregnant and what cream is best for taking off moustache hair and if you count the white flecks on your fingernails you can know how many boys are thinking of you and lots of other things I can’t remember now.

The baby’s feet had ten tiny toes, pale and see-through like a salamander’s, and these he popped into his mouth whenever he was hungry.

My home isn’t far but it’s not close either, and somehow I got it in my head one day to ask my mother to make me a sandwich and write a note to the principal so I could eat in the canteen too.

I’m no Spartan and hold up an anemic wrist to prove it. I can’t even blow up a balloon without getting dizzy.

She is the color of a bar of naphtha laundry soap, she is like the little brown piece left at the end of the wash, the hard little bone, my sister.

She couldn’t see the ceilings dusty with flies, the ugly maroon walls, the bottles and sticky spoons.

The top of the refrigerator busy with holy candles, some lit, some not, red and green and blue, a plaster saint and a dusty Palm Sunday cross, and a picture of the voodoo hand taped to the wall.

The hospital emergency room. Nobody but an intern working all alone.

¡Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country.

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.

She borrows opera records from the public library and sings with velvety lungs powerful as morning glories.

The green metal cage, the porcelain table top, the family that spoke like guitars.

There were sunflowers big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red fringe of theater curtains.