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Close Reading, Short analysis Lusus, Margaret Atwood They’ll have to say many charms over my ashes, to make sure I’m really dead this time. After a while I’ll become an upside-down saint; my finger bones will be sold as dark relics.

I’ll be a legend, by then. Perhaps in Heaven I’ll look like an angel. Or perhaps the angels will look like me. What a surprise that will be, for everyone else! It’s something to look forward to.

Lusus Naturae is a short story by the author Margaet Atwood and it is about what it is like to be seen as a monster by both your surroundings and by your own family. The young girl named Lusus was just seven years old when she became ill with the measles and shortly after that her life turned upside down. The narrator, the young girl's family does not only see her as a monster and ignores the fact that she is a human being but they also fake her death, lock her in her room all day and her.

From this short story, I have chosen lines that are at the end of this story. This is the part of the story when the villagers are looking for the young girl after she bit the boy in the forest, something that was supposed to be a kiss.Unfortunately the boy saw her running away, saw her running where.

In the first line when the young girl says ‘’ They’ll have to say many charms over my ashes’’, as a

reader you get the impression that she thinks the villagers will kill her when they kind her. Since she is speaking about her ashes, she is speaking from a future perspective. And when she is not alive anymore, the villagers will have to say many charms over her ashes. Almost like they want to seal her soul so they are assured that she cannot be resuscitated. She continues with ‘’To make sure i’m dead this time’’, where she probably probably refers to those times her family has faked her death previously in the story.

In the second line ‘’After a while I’ll become an upside-down saint’’, the girl thinks that she

will become an upside-down saint which is a common symbol attached to the church of satan and satanism or so one interprets it as meaning that she thinks she will become a saint because the upside-down cross is also associated with ‘’Cross of St .Peter’’. Lusus Naturae continues with the line ‘’...my finger bones will be sold as dark relics’’ which indicates that she believes that remnants of her body will be used for evil and bad usage. Such dark reliecs can be used in black magic.

‘’I'll be a legend, by then’’ creates a perception that the girl believes that people and people of the village will talk about her for several years and that they will not forget who she is and what she did. She continues talking about life after death by saying ‘’Perhaps in heaven, ill look like an angel’’ . This shows that she still has these thoughts about that when she will leave this life she will become an angel and look beautiful and normal again. She will not have the disease that makes everyone hate her. She continues to speculate by saying ‘’or Perhaps the angels will look like me’’, which shows that she has these scenarios in her head where she dreams about that one day she will be so beautiful that people will be looking like her, that maybe someday even the angels in heaven will look like her.

In the sixth and last line she creates these dream scenarios where she has these thoughts that one day people will be surprised over how beautiful she is and that even angels look like her. She says ‘’What a surprise that will be, for everyone else! It’s something to look forward to’’ which creates this feeling for the reader that this is something that she already has in her mind that it will happen since she is saying ‘ ’what a surprise That WILL be’ ’ and not ‘’what a surprise that COULD be’’. This shows that her scenario is something that she is expecting to happen one day, she just can not wait until everybody else gets to see it....