Adapted from Barnacles
by C. Safos
I had only been on deck for 20 minutes before Eugenio
decided to bore me with another one of his stories. He had as
much work to do as I did, but he still felt the need to ruin my
morning with his nonsense.
He only had six stories to choose from and among them all, I
must have heard those six stories a total of 3,487 times. I heard
them so many times, I could recite each one. I had heard them
so many times that I could measure time by the length of each
one. Eugenio's story about being stuck in a well took fifteen
minutes. His story about being related to Robert Kennedy took
forty-five minutes. His story about losing his pinky finger to a
mako shark could take almost an hour.
I didn't have that kind of time. I was already behind on my
duties because I had to pick up the slack for Brecken. He
claimed he was too sick to work this morning. It's funny, but
Brecken always seemed too sick to work when it was his turn to
pull in the crab cages. It's not like he needed to lie. His father
was the ship's captain, and whatever the captain sald went. If
the captain said I was on cage duty because his son was
sleeping off another late night, I was on cage duty. It wasn't fair,
but this was my last tour with this company.
All I had to show for it were the scars on my hands; they
looked like lines on a road map. I also had a pretty bad cough,
the kind of cough you get when the ice and cold makes a home
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1
Select the correct answer.
Which word best describes the mood of this passage?
OA. sympathy
OB. anticipation
OC. melancholy
OD.
annoyance