Rocking-Horse Winner

Good luck. It's one of my favorite short stories, but it is so well written that it's difficult to explain it. The story almost can't be told any other way without detracting from it. Let me try and help you a little bit, though.

Paul is, obviously, the protagonist. The story is about him and his efforts to help out his family which is suffering economic distress. When he rides his hobby horse, concentrating on the money problems, he gets flashes of intuition about which horses will come in as winners in upsoming races. By conveying this informition to -- his uncle, is it? -- he manages to become, in effect, the breadwinner for the family. His intuition is never wrong. The horses he picks while rocking on the rocking-horse are invariably winners. But this concentrated effort takes such a toll on him that, in the end, the effort to be the provider kills him.

As you can probably tell, I'm doing this from memory. There are other levels of symbolic meaning in the story, of course, but I think that for a 9th grade essay they might be a little too deep.