SAMUEL LUCAS
“That’s what the others said, anyway.”
As in Janet Frame’s ‘Swans’, where the reader realises the denial of adult omnipotence by the children, so too does the protagonist of my short story leading to isolation from his family. Isolation forms the bedrock of this story with the epiphany of the boy being the realisation that no one truly cares for him: throughout the story, adults cast him out, with his mother ‘sweeping him into the hall’. I make use of proleptic irony via the yew tree where the child plans to take refuge. He views the yew as a place of safety away from his warring family, but fails to realise that its berries are poisonous, a prolepsis of the grandmother surrounded by her sloe gin described as ‘lethal’.
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