Tomato Capsule

The story focuses on Kino, his wife Juana, and their infant son Coyotito. Kino is a diver and a fisher, and although his family lives peacefully they live in poverty. As they have very little money, they are reduced to having their son sleep in a box. One day a scorpion crawls into Coyotito’s box and stings him. Juana attempts to suck the poison out of the wound. When this fails, Kino and Juana seek out a doctor. The doctor, hearing that they are poor, tells his butler to send them away, not wanting to help them. Kino goes pearl diving and finds “the Pearl of the World”, a pearl which is the size of a seagull’s egg. Meanwhile, Coyotito recovers from the scorpion’s sting. Word of find the pearl had reached the doctor. The doctor, fuelled by greed to help the family, comes to ‘cure’ Coyotito, and gives the baby a medicine, saying the scorpions bite will continue to make him sick. Shortly after, Coyotito falls ill again, implying that the doctor poisoned him. The local priest comes to ble...

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years. It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferso...