Despair

In Brooklyn, small Murray Folkoy, 6, was playing in the street as he had been told not to do. When the principal of the public school where Murray Folkoy attended kindergarten called him into her study on the third floor, Murray Folkoy was scared. He did not expect her to beat him, he did not even know whether she would speak severely or not. But he did know vaguely that whatever she said would break the gay delight he had discovered in going to kindergarten; it could never be so merry and beautiful again. Finally, miserable, full of an unexplainable despair, small Murray Folkoy jumped out of the window. In the hospital, where doctors said he might recover from a broken leg and other injuries, his mother sat by his bed, his friends sent up messages, even the principal came to see how he was getting along.

Death of a Young Man

Until they die, dying must remain for people a wild and impossible conjecture. Most people, with casual cowardice, do not contemplate death as they approach it. The result of the mind's bouncing, like a tennis ball, between the racquets of Life and Death, is usually expressed completely, inarticulately, paradoxically, in the trite phrase: "What does it all matter?" Having reached this point, normal people have breakfast; abnormal people kill themselves.

In Manhattan, John Franklin Chattin, 24, art student, committed suicide. In his room the landlady found some old sketches, mostly grotesque faces, an essay that fumbled with sad puerility at a definition of mortality, a note saying: "What does it all matter anyhow?" and a copy of Death of a Young Man by W. L. Rivers (see p. 38 for a review).

Lesson

The terror of darkness is the first and so the deepest of all fears. It was a thing that made a little three-year-old girl in Juliette, Ga., lie shaking in bed at night, kept awake by a troop of crying phantoms and wild dreadful faces. Every closet was to her a nest of horrors; great cats crouched on the shelves, snakes writhed among the shoes on the floor; if you put your ear to the keyhole when the door was shut, you could hear them mewing and hissing, but no matter how suddenly you looked in, the wise, hungry creatures could hide before you saw them. Cupboards were all right when the door was open, so people forgot about the darkness in them when the door was shut. If anybody ever got locked in one--the snakes would get her.

The three-year-old girl told her mother, Mrs. Raymond Gunn, about this awful secret and advised her to be careful. Mrs. Gunn, who often had to go five times to her daughter's room to say goodnight, who had often had to quiet a mighty fear by leaving a crack in the door to the lighted hall, listened carefully. Then she said: "You come with me. I'm going to teach you a lesson." She put her small daughter in a closet, closed the door, locked it, listened to her daughter's screams and walked away.

The screams got louder. A choking voice cried: "Mother, there's a snake here. Something's after me. There's a snake. Open the door, Mother, it's after me Open. . . ." With that there was no more screaming. Mrs. Gunn opened the door so quickly that she saw one of the snakes that live in closets, but first she saw the little girl who was lying on the floor dead, her eyes bulging wide open with horror, her torn, swollen tongue sticking out rudely. Around her small neck a whip snake made a tight black coil; it twinkled its quick tiny tongue at Mrs. Gunn and hissed and sneaked away into the darkness among the shoes.

Roommates

In Chicago, two men lived together in the same room. One, Sam Danko, was accustomed to fall asleep quickly and then moan sadly and snore the whole night through. The other, Gust Hansen, was accustomed to lie broad awake and furious. Often, when he did fall asleep, he would start up, sweating from a nightmare of falling airplanes, or lions roaring at him through a green, gigantic forest. For two years he thought of silencing the hoarse nuisance next him, that stung his nerves crackling and whining like a radio someone has left turned on and out of tune. Last week he had an idea. Slowly he tiptoed to the snorer's bed and stared into his face; it was like putting his nose near a riveting machine. Gust Hansen shuddered and held his roommate's shoulder with one hand; with the other he patted Sam Danko to wake him up, and said: "You have kept me awake for two years. You make too much noise when you sleep. Wake up." Sam Danko looked at Gust Hansen's white face in wild sleepy amazement. "Oh I've kept you awake for two years," he said, "for two years. . . . Well, now I will fix it so you can sleep." With that, Sam Danko grabbed an axe and drove it into the side of Gust Hansen, killing him.