The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros

I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be.

There ain’t thirty different kinds of snow, Lucy says. There are two kinds. The clean kind and the dirty kind, clean and dirty. Only two.

Now you know to talk to drunks is crazy and to tell them your name is worse, but who can blame her. She is young and dizzy to hear so many sweet things in one day, even if it is a bum man’s whiskey words saying them.

We are tired of being beautiful. Lucy hides the lemon shoes and the red shoes and the shoes that used to be white but are now pale blue under a powerful bushel basket on the back porch, until one Tuesday her mother, who is very clean, throws them away. But no one complains.

But I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.