Question 2

(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)

The following excerpt is from Brenda Peynado’s short story “The Rock Eaters,” published in 2021. In this passage,
the narrator is one of a group of people who left their home country after developing the ability to fly, an ability that
is accepted as realistically possible within the story. Years later, the group returns to that country with their children.
Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Peynado uses literary elements and
techniques to convey the narrator’s complex experience of this return home.

In your response you should do the following:
• Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents a defensible interpretation.
• Select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning.
• Explain how the evidence supports your line of reasoning.
• Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.

We were the first generation to leave our island
country. We were the ones who developed a distinct
float to our walk on the day we came of age. Soon
Line enough we were hovering inches above the ground,
then somersaulting with the clouds, finally
discovering we could fly as far as we’d ever wanted.
And so we left. Decades later, we brought our
children back to see our home country. That year, we
all decided we were ready to return.

We jackknifed through clouds and dodged large
birds. We held our children tightly; they had not yet
learned to fly. Behind us trailed roped-together lines
of suitcases packed with gifts from abroad. We
wondered who would remember us.

Our parents, those who were still alive, came out to
greet us, hands on their brows like visors. Some were
expecting us. Others were surprised, terrified at the
spectacle of millions of their prodigals<sup>1</sup> blotting the
sky with our billowing skirts, our shirts starched for
the arrival. We touched down on our parents’
driveways, skidding to rough landings at their feet,
denting cars, squashing flowers, rattling windows.
Our old friends and siblings, the ones we’d left
behind, kept their doors locked. They peered through
window blinds at the flattened flowerbeds, the
suitcases that had burst and strewn packages all over
the yards and streets, our youngest children squealing
now that they’d been released, the peace we’d broken
by returning. They didn’t trust us, not after our
betrayal decades ago, the whiff of money we’d earned
or lost in other countries like a suspect stench. Our
parents hugged their grandchildren and brought them
inside to houses with no electricity, candles wavering
like we were in a séance. “More brownouts,” they told us.
“We remember,” we said, recoiling at how little
the place fit us anymore. Those first nights we slept in
our old beds, our feet hanging over the edges, the
noises of the city and the country crowing and
honking us awake, music from radios and guitars,
celebrations we’d not been invited to.
We dragged our children along to knock on the
doors of old friends and siblings, the ones who never
developed the ability to fly. They eventually,
reluctantly, opened their doors. At first we sat stiffly
on couches and inquired after their health and others
we once knew. Then we got them to laugh with us
about the time we pulled the nuns’ skirts or put gum
in the kink of a rival’s hair, when we caught baby
chicks in the village and raised them, or cracked open<sup>2</sup>
almonds on the malecón. Then their children came
shyly out of their rooms and took ours by the hand.
We smiled when we saw them climbing trees together
in the patios, their children showing ours how to eat
cajuilitos solimán and acerolas<sup>3</sup> from the branch.

We introduced our children to everyone we used to
know: at colmados,<sup>4</sup> by the side of the road, at the
baseball fields, at country clubs we had to beg to be
let back into. We showed our children the flamboyán
trees in the parks, blooms of coral red spilling in the
dirt. We showed them the granite striated through the
rock faces of mountains, the glimmering pebbles
under waterfalls, the red dust that stained the seats of
their best clothes. We walked past the stray dogs that
growled and whined; the most ancient among them
remembered us, wagging their tails when they saw us
and running to sniff our offspring. We dunked our
children into the rivers we’d once swum. We dug
through the banks for the arrowheads that belonged to
the Tainos, who’d been erased after the Spanish came,
their remnants lost in the mud.
Lost, the children whispered in awe and fear,
turning the black, glinting points in their palms,
testing the hardness of flint between their teeth. Back
in our foreign homes, we had never talked to them of
history.
We remembered we’d been happy. “We loved this
land,” we said. We forget why we ever left.

<sup>1</sup>children who have left home and then returned
<sup>2</sup>a walkway along a waterfront
<sup>3</sup>Cajuilitos solimán and acerolas are types of fruit.
<sup>4</sup>neighborhood stores
