Down the street the dogs are barking

Abstract

own the streets the dogs are barking traces my life from about the age five to the age sixteen, give or take a couple days. But it isn’t about one girl. No. It’s a story told through the mouths of several girls—myself now, twenty-year-old college student, stable, we could say, content, telling from here through my sixteen-year-old twin whose telling about her fifteen-year-old look-alike whose telling about... and on and on. As Sandra Cisneros claims, “the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.”1 Each of those years gains its own interpretation of its predecessors and itself and never truly passes with the celebration of the next.