Page 66

By Jack Joseph Smith

from the peak of Morrison Drive. He was standing there with a bunch of other kids and he hit me in the mouth as soon as I turned into my driveway. It was my first fight and I blindly ran at him butting him in the middle and wrapped my arms around his waist and moved my body a little and tripped him as my force moved him. He started to turn me over, but I jumped up and stood away from him ready for anything. I looked past the blur of kids faces and saw my mother standing in our doorway and then fast rushed at him again. I felt my body moving in the same way and I was on him again bitting my teeth together and calling on all the strength I had until he started to move me again and I left him on the ground and jumped away. My mother yelled for me to come in and I quickly turned from him and walked our driveway until I passed by her and then through the front door my soul pounding with a victory that left no scars. She had waited. The Irish in her had waited and he had gone down twice, and my wit was keen enough to leave him there. It was the begining of me becoming a new kind of king. A king that would have to leave his throne for the battle field when his real soul was in the poetry of the worked gold. School began for me again and it was a fitting place for one who was working his way up to kingship through princehood. Mount Mercy Academy was the name taking the souls of tame and pleasant children who wore robes in the morning and knickers and pinafores to long laced sleeves in the afternoon. I soon discovered that Mount Mercy Academy was a girls school, and so prestigeious for young boys up to the sixth grade that it took me two years to talk my parents into letting me leave. All the highschool and

Original Scan

Page 66

AI Interpretation

GPT

The first fight ends in a felt victory under the mother's watch, and the child recasts himself as a new kind of king before entering Mount Mercy Academy, a prestigious girls' school that becomes the next place to resist and outgrow.

What matters is less the mechanics of the fight than the inward transformation afterward, with combat becoming proof of wit, force, and emerging self-rule. The turn to Mount Mercy keeps that kingship language slightly ironic, since the new school is immediately framed as another ordered world he will have to push against.

Claude

Pumpkin hits the narrator in the mouth at his driveway, and in his first fight the boy butts him, trips him twice, and walks away with his mother watching from the doorway, 'my soul pounding with a victory that left no scars'; then school resumes at Mount Mercy Academy, which he discovers is a girls school he takes two years to talk his way out of.

The fight is told as a coronation, the start of 'a new kind of king' whose real soul lies 'in the poetry of the worked gold', so physical courage and artistic identity are fused early. The mother's silent waiting and 'The Irish in her' frame the victory as inherited nerve, and the shift to the prestigious girls school undercuts the royal mood with comic embarrassment.