Exploring the minds of six year olds can be a very interesting experience. Gary Soto tells this story as a kid in a time when he seems young and silly. Soto does a great job of showing the contrast between right and wrong through the eyes of a child. He successfully conveys the boy's guilt through the use of imagery, repetition, and contrast. He uses these tools to take the reader into the boy's mind so they can explore his guilt and thoughts. First he lets the reader know what he is thinking with the use of images. It begins with a darker point, “my sweet tooth gleams and guilt juice soaks my armpits.” This shows that he had already committed the crime in his mind before actually committing the act. As she sat down to eat her cake, she pictured a beautiful summer day, thinking, "The sun was swaying in the branches of a yellowish sycamore." He shows that he is happy to finally eat the cake he stole. He showed his guilt when he says, “I wiped my sticky fingers on the grass and rolled my tongue around the corners of my mouth.” This depicts an allusion to the popular phrase "There is blood on your hands", meaning that you are guilty of something. He also shows his guilt by thinking, "A squirrel has pinned itself high on the trunk, where it has forked into two large bark-covered limbs." This is a biblical allusion to the cross on which Jesus was crucified. These images help convey his guilt. One of the major contrasts in the passage is Soto's greed versus kindness. This is best exemplified when his neighbor, Johnny Strabico, politely asks for a piece of pie and Soto rudely pushes him away. Then Johnny Strabico tells him: “Your hands… in the center of the paper… the image is when Soto is sitting on the lawn after eating the cake, and he looks around. "A car honked and the driver knew it. Mrs. Hancock was standing on the lawn, hands on her hips, and she knew it. My mother, who peeled a mountain of potatoes at the Redi-Spud factory, knew it ." The repetition of "knew" shows how paranoid Soto is that people will find out that he stole the cake. Paranoia almost always emerges in people when they feel guilty for having done something. It also shows that Soto isn't very good at masking the guilt he feels. Soto feels terribly guilty for stealing the cake from the store. He demonstrates this in many different ways. There are many rhetorical devices in the passage, and they are used to show the guilt he had when he stole that cake. Images, contrasts and repetitions were some of the most important topics in which he expressed his guilt and sin.