The Unworthy

When the narrator’s memories overwhelm her, she tries to hide her tears. She remembers she is at a funeral banquet and cries openly, mourning her lost mother, father, books, and her “family of tarantula kids” (62) who had helped her survive before being brutally murdered by adults in their sleep. She remembers breaking into the National Library with the tarantula kids, where they made a bonfire out of books to keep warm. The narrator hated burning books, feeling like she “was setting fire to a world” (65), but they had no other choice. As a compromise, she tried to only burn books about politics or mathematics, or those in different languages. She was one of the few children who could read, so she read stories to the other tarantula kids. She read them a story about a girl who visited a house where a tiger prowled the rooms and another about a man who vomited small rabbits. The children laughed and danced in silence so as not to draw unwanted attention. They called themselves tarantula kids because they were “dangerous.” They ate whatever small animals they could catch, carefully avoiding the “adults” who “wanted to break [them]” (65).