A Summer Life by Gary Soto is a story about the time where he sinned at six years of age. In this story he steals an apple pie from a market and goes to back to where he lives. He starts to feel guilty about the sin that he committed. During this experience he goes through three personal stages of fear. Soto goes through the details of his guilt for the incident and shares fear of divine punishment, anxiety about the community’s reproach, and disappointment in himself. Divine punishment is one of Soto’s main fears in the story. In the story, Soto is a religious follower that believes in God. Later in the story he goes under his house and starts to get paranoid. He hears plumbing in the pipes and asks “Is it God?”. Soto thinks of religious lessons