MELISSA BLOCK, host: Here's a very small piece of fiction from Ruth Forman.  It's titled "Bars      on Windows."</s>RUTH FORMAN: `The window covered with rusted, 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 stuck on a      bar with a whack. `And why do we stand for this?' he wondered.  `Why not      move to someplace 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      Jorje(ph), and he was only 16 and still in the 10th 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.</s>RUTH FORMAN: He closed the window and latched the latch.  The bell was about to ring.      He snubbed the cigarette on the sill and flicked 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.</s>MELISSA BLOCK, host: "Bars on Windows" read by the author Ruth Forman.
Here's a very small piece of fiction from Ruth Forman. It's titled "Bars on Windows."