Once Upon a Nightmare

From beginning to end, I was slightly disturbed by Nadine Gordimer's short story Once Upon a Time.  To me, the entire story was constantly dripping with paranoia.  Every action of the parents of the story was to try and protect themselves and their son from dangerous criminals.  "There were many burglaries in the suburb" (Gordimer, 233), and this made everyone uneasy.  It was ironic that, the more preventive measures the families in the area took, the more the crime rate went up.  All of their obnoxious and useless alarms just made enough noise to cover up the sounds of one's house being robbed!
The more Gordimer repeated the phrase that the family was living "happily ever after", the more they clearly were NOT!  They just kept building up more and more walls and security systems around them, until they eventually became prisoners of their own home!  They had taken all the precautions, such as signs, fences, and walls, to warn those on the outside not to harm them.  They never did, however, warn their SON about everything their yard possessed.  They didn't want to ruin his precious fairytale by advising caution about the deadly coils along their fence.  He had never been warned, as the rest of the world had.  He was the one thing the parents had been trying to protect, and he was the one thing that ultimately ended up being taken away from them.