HAYWIRE Issue 2 Fall 2013
know that. I pull the pin out of the
grenade and toss it. I am far enough
away that the explosion does not
affect me. Sarah too close. A
thousand tiny shards of burning
metal plunge into her skin. The
monster has it far worse. The blue
goop of what used to be his internal
organs is splattered all over the dock.
The screams of horror, as bystanders
see what I have done, breaks
whatever piece of humanity I have
left.
When I threw the grenade, I
knew she had no chance. If it hadn‘t
been her and the monster, we all
would have died. I cannot return
home now. I will live on with the
weight of death heavy on my back as
I run forever from the past.
I want to disappear. Going,
Going, Going…Gone.
Innocence
On Crossing into Adulthood in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye
By Abigail Dye, 9th grade
Many characters in books try to fight for something
they desperately want to accomplish; sometimes they
succeed and sometimes they fail. In the novel Catcher in
the Rye (1995) by J.D. Salinger the reader gets
introduced to a very troubled teenager: Holden
Caulfield. Throughout the book it is revealed that
Holden’s one desire in life is to keep the purity of youth
alive in everyone. This young man cannot even seem to
function in real life because he gets so distracted with
the distortion of society. Salinger uses the irony of
Holden mixing up a song that represents his life goal,
his love of unchanging objects, and his exhausting fight
to save purity to tell the reader that maybe complete
innocence cannot exist in this world.
Holden desperately desires to save the innocence in
this world, but that may be too big of a job for one
teenager. Holden tells his sister, Phoebe, that the only
thing he would really like to be when he grows older is
essentially an “innocence saver” as seen in this quote,
“I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I
have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go
over the cliff…”(p.173) This cliff that Holden talks
about is the line between the innocence