Let's start with a close reading.
1. Read the story.
2. Retell or rewrite the story in a few sentences - keep to what happens (just facts) and leave out the rest.
3. Read the story again. Don't rush.
What does the writer let us know by choosing the details (e.g. electric green, I was hunting lemons, spoilt gold, her hair roared red)?
What do we learn about the characters, their relationship, the surroundings?
What do you discover about how the text sounds?
4. What do you prefer: reading /being told about an event in a literary form (e.g. a microstory, a short story, a poem, a prose poem, a song lyrics, etc.) or just learning the basics of what happened as a matter of fact? Why?
Lemons (by Joy Sullivan)
It was rainy season and everything in the grove was electric green.
I was hunting lemons. My job was to find the ripe among the fallen. I remember the sweet stink of exhausted citrus. Spoiled gold in the heat, how the fruit sweated in my palm. My sister was running past. She was four years older, full of goodness and gullibility whereas I was young and rotten and one for stories.
I used to tell her I’d seen fairies the size of tadpoles in the river.
That I knew a spell to repair lost time. Gullibility is a kind of bigheartedness, I think, and when she finally learned the joke, it always broke her heart.
Snakes were common in the grove, but I remember how horribly beautiful this one was. How it lifted itself, an iridescent arrow.
Mambas are fast and deadly and when I screamed snake, my sister stood among the fallen lemons, swaying slightly, weighing whether or not to believe. I can still feel her eyes searching me, the seconds slipping, the dying sun making her hair roar red. It wasn’t until I wept that she stepped out of the grove and for the first time, I realized what words meant. I saw them clearly-full of either venom or veracity. The dumb plum of my heart split open.
That night, I told my sister I loved her. I told her the truth.
