2005年NPR美国国家公共电台八月-Very Short Fiction: 'Bars'

（单词翻译）

Here is a very small piece of fiction from Ruth Forman. It's titled "Bars on Windows".

The window covered with rusted¹ black iron bars looked like jail, he thought, though he'd never been to jail. He wondered when exactly the bars were added. They didn't match the smooth white of the window and certainly did not fit the way the window opened out onto the world. Every time he unlatched the catch and swung the window out, it's stuck on the bar with a whack⁴. "And why do we stand for this?" He wondered, "Why not move to some place where schools did not have bars on their windows, a place where people kept their doors open and unlocked and ready for company."
"Felt like more than keeping people out, they were locking themselves in", he thought. But what did he know? His name was only Horehan, he was only 16 and still in the tenth grade, and he did not know which teacher wanted him to go to college since no one asked him what he wanted to do for a living. Perhaps they assumed he already knew. He closed the window and latched³ the latch². The bell was about to ring. He snubbed the cigarette on the sill and flicked⁵ it in the can, washed his hands with the nasty powdered soap above the sink—he hated dirty hands—wiped them on his jeans and grabbed his worn copy of Hamlet. He didn't care what they said. Bars on windows, just didn't seem right.

"Bars on Windows", read by the author Ruth Forman.