“Do Not Eat,” by Ansley Ayers is a very nerve-wracking story that keeps the reader on the edge of his or her seat.  The story is about a narrator who is very curious.  She got access to one of the packets of silica gel that say “DO NOT EAT” and began an internal debate as to whether or not to eat one of the balls from the packet.  Later on, the girl tries to get the poison from the ball she ate out of her mouth.  She does not want to tell her mom what she did, but she knows she must, and she does.  The story is well-told and does a good job of building suspense, party through the repetition of the words “DO NOT EAT.”

In this story, the author writes, “It felt like a matter of life or death, but it also seemed to me that I had already made that decision long ago.”  This quote shows hat is going through the narrator’s mind after she ate the ball from the poison packet.  She feels that her death is near and that she should not have eaten the ball.  She realized what a mistake she had made.  This story brings me back to a time when my parents thought my sister had eaten a coin.  This too could possibly kill her and my parents called poison control and sent her to the emergency room.  Then, we found out that she hadn’t even eaten the coin.  This led me to think throughout the story that at some point, the reader would find out that the narrator hadn’t eaten the silica gel.  This did not happen however, which made me somewhat upset, because the narrator actually was in danger of death.  Overall, this story shows the reader that curiosity can, indeed, lead to harm.