Collateral Damage
By David Evans

Collateral Damage is written by David Evans and he focus on coming of age in a difficult family with many internal problems, like divorce, new family members, money and happiness in life, so the short story’s theme is nature vs. nurture. It’s a story probably everybody can identify with, the feeling of a life, where everything is good and suddenly takes your life a confusing rotation; like if your mother and father got a divorce. On the outside are you smiling, but it’s only a facade. The boy in this short story is facing those issues and tries to displace them; he almost dies.

The short story starts in medias res because there are no introductions to any of the characters, actually there are no names in the short story besides the millionaire’s; Richard. The main character in the story is flat, it’s indirectly described that he’s gay and we see the story from his perspective. It’s a 3rd person narrator with a limited point of view attached to the boy. The story takes place in a big house near the beach where we get the first introduction to the boy. The boy in the short story is depressed about his life, because of his mom and dad’s divorce and his mom’s new man. There isn’t any information about the real dad, because his mother married another man, a billionaire.

As mentioned above there are 3 central characters in this short story: The boy, his mom and stepfather. As I mentioned the boys is very depressed by his life. The boy is homosexual as the text already says on the first page, where he stays on the balcony at the beach house watching young men with washboard. The boy’s sexuality is a hot potato in his home, because his stepfather is against it, he focus on the external values, so he picks on the boy. It causing that the boy’s self-esteem is so low that he can’t even look himself in the mirror without thinking