In her autobiographical sketch One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty wrote of her mother: ‘But I think she was relieved when I chose to be a writer of stories, for she thought writing was safe.’ Can you just imagine the shock on Chestina Welty’s face when she read, as she must have, this sentence tucked away into the middle of one of her daughter’s first stories: ‘When he finally looked down there was blood everywhere; her lap was like a bowl.’ What has happened here in this story called ‘Flowers for Marjorie’ is that the domestic has disintegrated into death; the danger which threatens even the most ordinary fact of a young man and his pregnant wife has moved in and taken over. For all her mother’s protective efforts, as Eudora Welty writes at the end of her sketch, ‘A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.’