One of my favorite stories that I’ve read this semester has to be “The Veldt” by Bradbury. The story is strange and dark and foreshadows such a sinister ending that I myself did not see coming. The idea of giving your children everything that they want just to please them seems a lot scarier now after reading because there are some real-life situations much like the one told in “The Veldt”. Parents, George and Lydia live in a house that is powered to do everything for them. Their children, Wendy and Peter specifically love the nursery of the house because they can turn the room into whatever they imagine. Both George and Lydia have had enough of feeling useless and want the whole family to go on a little vacation, so they make the decision to turn the power to the house and nursery off. The children become furious because of this and demand that the power be turned back on. George and Lydia give in to their children and restore the power to the nursery. The children lure their parents into the nursery where they are then eaten alive by lions and killed. The decision of the children is extreme by all means but there some people out there that really do become so upset at someone else’s decision that they hurt or even kill them.  

Another one of my favorite stories would have to be “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” by Parsons. The story follows a young female immigration officer working for the United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) by the name of Jaswinder Smith (Jazz). She takes her job of determining who has the right reasons to be in the UK, very seriously. She seems to have a lot of experience because she handles each passenger with a no-nonsense attitude and can tell if they are being honest or not by the tone of their voice and answers they give to her questions. She decides who has the right reasons to be in the UK by examining each passenger’s passport and asking them why they have come to the UK. If you look at the passenger’s decisions, you can see that they weren’t as thought out as all of Jazz’s decisions. For example, Megan said that she came to the UK to visit Madame Tussauds to look at candles when it’s a famous wax museum filled with wax-figures of famous people. Another passenger that Jazz was familiar with decided to eat his passport but later came to find that the airport had an X-ray machine to look inside of him. Even though the passengers didn’t help themselves with the decisions they made, it helped Jazz make her ultimate decision of who was there for the wrong reasons or not.   Â