Say What? (A Response to the Surprises of “Shocking Accident” and “Rocking Horse Winner”)

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In the story, “Rocking Horse Winner,” a little boy has a rocking horse. It is a very dear toy to him. The boy grows up with his mother always complaining about how unlucky she thinks she is. She, without knowing it, affects her son in a very negative way. He makes it his job to prove his mother wrong. He figures out that through some sort of crazy magic, his rocking horse can predict the winners of horse races and tell the boy. Maybe it’s actually a rocking unicorn. Its horn is invisible, or maybe it was surgically removed when the unicorn was turned into plastic, and its rainbow coloured hair painted brown. Somehow, though it could still use its magical powers and talk to a boy. The boy uses his magical unicorn to win lots of money. Then, he dies. The moral of this story is that you can never trust a unicorn, especially if it had its horn surgically removed and its hair died. Anyone who dies his or her hair is obviously dishonest about his or her hair colour, and therefore, presumably, other matters as well, and unicorns are no exception. Watch out for unicorns, guys. Also, watch out for pigs, especially while walking through the slums of Naples. “A Shocking Accident” is about a boy whose father is killed by a pig. When one hears that someone was killed by a pig, the natural reaction is to laugh. Being killed by pigs, however, is no laughing matter. Imagine a six-hundred pound beast with razor-sharp tusks. Its eyes are bright red. Its face is smeared with the blood of its last meal. Yes, people, this is a carnivorous pig. It’s not funny at all. Unfortunately, this pig is not the one who killed the boy’s father. The boy’s father was killed by a fat pig falling on his head from a fifth-story balcony. That...

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... down a crowded hallway when someone taps on your shoulder. When you turn around, you see your favourite person in the whole school, the person about whom you were just thinking. It’s pretty obvious which one of these is more shocking, especially when the people in this school who annoy me greatly outnumber those with whom I enjoy conversing. Actually, not that many people annoy me. It’s just highly unlikely that someone would want to talk to me in the hallway, but enough with my silly complaining. The ending of “A Shocking Accident” was definitely much more shocking than the ending of “The Rocking Horse Winner.” That says something about literature. A happy ending is just not to be expected when reading the kind of literature in our textbooks. That’s too bad. Happy stuff makes me happy. Sad stuff makes me sad. It’s quite peculiar that it happens that way.

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