Angels Without Wings

Violence is the stuff of which the history of the human race is written—and the never ending cycle goes on, and for all purposes, all we do is wring out hands in total shock and incapacitation, or simply look on with indifference. Quoting Shirley Jackson’s on her most anthologized short fiction “The Lottery,” “. . . by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite [emphasis mine] in the present and in my own village, to shock the story’s reader with a graphic dramatization of the pointless and general inhumanity in their own lives,” it is hoped that the senselessness of it will hit home. In what Ralph Ellison terms “fictional truth,” the events and acts so described in this story, about other human beings caught in the madness of pride, avarice, and sheer stupidiy, do we find examples of our better natures.