(52 days of short fiction) Week 2: Graham Greene 'The Destructors'

I first read this short story at eighteen. Revisiting the prose again over ten years later, I seemed to experience a far greater horror at the destruction/creation (the destruction as an act, in itself, of creation) of the crippled house. The subtle and complex shift in favour from Blackie to T, the feral, unquestioning 'mob' mentality and the steadfast obedience of the group to the one leader were what struck me in my earlier years. Rereading, it was Blackie's troubling concern over the use of the word 'beautiful', T's refusal to be drawn in to the binary notions of love and hate, his insistence on sheer materiality and the danger signalled when one's full name is used that stuck like fresh raspberry stains on my thoughts. T's insistence that they 'be like worms', make the walls fall down, rang with insidious intent; the parasitic analogy remarkably apt, both in the boys' hurried movements and the blindness with which each boy played out his part.

(Graham Greene, Twenty-One Stories, Penguin, London, 1992)