Reading Paul Bowles’s Collected Stories, it was this tale that stood out. While containing nothing fantastical, it does have little sprinklings of magic. It could almost be a fairy tale. In this story, a six-year-old boy called Donald, who lives with his parents in New York City, visits the New England farm of his maternal grandparents at Christmas. There, he fantasizes that a wolf smashes through a window and carries away his bullying and physically abusive father. Donald views the farm as an enchanted and magical place, a place where perhaps his rebellious spirit can take the form of a wolf and rid him of his father for good.
First published in Harper’s Bazaar, 1957, and collected in The Time of Friendship, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, and then in the Collected Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009
A Personal Anthology 