Asked to contribute to an anthology of stories for children, the writer replies that "I don't write children's stories." She then tells one anyway. What does that refusal establish about the tale that follows?

The creaking that wakes the writer is not an intruder: her house is built over worked-out gold-mine stopes, and rock falling "three thousand feet below" shifts it. What does this establish before the inner tale begins?

The writer notes she has "no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow," yet lies rigid in the dark, "a victim already." What does the frame establish about her relation to the family she is about to invent?

In the frame the writer recalls a woman murdered in broad daylight two blocks away, and an old widower's fierce dogs strangled before he was knifed by a laborer he had dismissed without pay. What do these give the inner tale?

Gordimer's story opens with a first-person writer who cannot sleep, then starts again: "In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife..." What is this two-part structure called?

The family in the inner tale add one defense after another. Which one comes LAST?

Which defense did the family already have from the very start, before any riot or burglary in the tale?

The wife fears people might come up the street, tear off the plaque and stream in. Her husband says there are police, soldiers, tear-gas and guns to stop them, but has one thing fitted anyway to please her. What?

What finally persuades the family to put burglar bars on the doors and windows and install an alarm?

The wall around the property is made higher with extra bricks. Who pays for them, and as what?

Having read a fairy story the night before, the little boy plays the Prince braving the thicket of thorns, drags a ladder to the wall and creeps into the coil, where he is torn open and has to be hacked out. Why is this the central irony?

The night before he climbs the wall, the boy's mother reads him a fairy story from the book his grandmother gave him at Christmas. What does he pretend to be the next day?

The coil is bought to keep the family safe and it is what kills their son. What is the name for an outcome that is the opposite of what was intended?

As the boy screams in the wire and the household runs to him, the alarm starts wailing anyway, set off for some reason the narrator guesses is the cat. Why is that detail ironic?

The trusted housemaid and the itinerant gardener reach the boy first, and the gardener tears his hands trying to get him out of the wire. Why does this deepen the story's irony?

The tale keeps saying the family were "living happily ever after," including in the sentence where workmen stretch the razor coils round the walls. What does the repeated formula accomplish?

Gordimer's narrator calls the husband's mother "that wise old witch." What does the phrase accomplish?

Nobody in the inner tale is given a name: there is a man, his wife, a little boy, a trusted housemaid, an itinerant gardener. What does that accomplish?

The inner tale opens "In a house, in a suburb, in a city" and never names the country. Riots outside town, loiterers called tsotsis and jacaranda-lined streets are what locate it. What does the unnamed setting accomplish?

The fairy story the mother reads is the same material the outer writer refused to produce for the children's anthology. What does Gordimer's use of fairy-tale language finally accomplish?