Lamb to the Slaughter Poem

In the short story, Lamb to the Slaughter, by the famous author Roald Dahl, features a wife and a husband, named Mary Maloney and Patrick Maloney, respectively. Throughout the entire story, a main external conflict was shown and emphasized by the author: man vs man. Mary Maloney and Patrick started arguing over if Patrick (the husband) should eat dinner or not, beginning the escalating man vs man conflict. In my poem, I started off with Patrick telling Mary that he was going to earn more money but leaving her on her own with enough money and resources to survive. In the story, Roald Dahl wrote, “Sit down…[l]isten…I’ve got something to tell you…[a]nd he told her”, showing that something bad had happened even though the author did not specifically write what Patrick had actually said to his wife. But the “rising action” part of the conflict was when Mary still went to make dinner for Patrick, and had been “dazed”, had the “desire to vomit”, and had “a slight nausea”. This led to the murder of Patrick later on in the story, since the wife had been confused with so many thoughts and had not taken in the new information. “Everything was automatic now”, I put this in the poem show that Mary was following her muscle memory now, but to make dinner. I wanted to make the poem more suspenseful, so I connected the quote with events that happened later on: “Everything was automatic now… she lifted it out and look at it… a leg of lamb”, hinting that Mary was looking at the leg of lamb in a different way than usual and was up to something. The trigger that made Mary kill Patrick was when Patrick said he did not want to eat dinner and wanted to leave their house, Mary was filled with rage and slammed the leg of lamb onto her husband’s neck/spine. “She might just as well have hit him with a steel club”, this is the main evidence showing the man vs man external conflict. They had yelled and fought verbally, had used the silent treatment, but nothing was more impactful than the leg of lamb strike on the neck. In conclusion, it is evident that the short story had the man vs man external conflict, and I had added all the quotes that could describe this conflict into my poem.