I am Legend Post #2

I really liked Matheson's Dress of White Silk. I liked the way he played with the grammar and sentence structure so that I could imagine a young child speaking. It did however, trip me up a few times like on page 225 where it says "No she said she was so mad and red it has a hole in it." At first I could not figure out the subject the sentence. It took me a little bit to realize that it was a combination of two thoughts. Even though I now know there are two ideas represented in this sentence, I still as not quite sure which thought "red" is part of. Because the story changes a lot depending on what "red" is making a reference to. Red could refer to the fact that the narrator pinched Mary Jane which was why she was angry but it also could refer to the dress as in
" 'It is too, white' I said, 'all white, and clean, and silky'
'No,' she said, she was so mad 'and red, it has a hole in it'"
The first time I read it I thought it referred to the dress so my reading on the whole story was a little different than it had been the second time I read it. The first time I read it through, I thought that the mother had been murdered or with going with the theme from I am Legend, that she was killed by vampires or became a vampire. The whole in the dress with red or blood, I saw, as either being caused by a gun or knife if she had been murdered, or a stake if she had been a vampire. I thought the daughter might have been a vampire because of the last couple of lines "She wont let me out. Well Im not scared. Who cares if she locks me in a million billion years? She doesn't have to even give me supper. Im not hungry anyway. Im full." That combined with the ambiguousness of what happened to Mary Jane makes me think that the narrator killed her. "There was something else because I think I heard some one call don't let her say that! I couldn't hold to the dress. And I had it on me I cant remember. Because I was grown up and strong. But I was a little girl still I think. I mean on the outside."
The narrator also thinks that the room smells good but Mary Jane is disgusted by the smell so that makes me think that a vampire would think that blood/death smells good.
The second time I read it I decided that "red" most likely went with the pinch the narrator gave Mary Jane so that takes the blood aspect out of the dress but I still read that the narrator was a vampire, it just made me see the mother's death a little differently.
I definitely thought this story was a vampire story so that is the connection I draw to I am Legend and I am not sure this story is a horror story because it does not add an element of horror until the very end when the narrator gets mad at Mary Jane and gets locked up. I thought it started out innocently enough with a little bit of sadness over the mother's death but I really did not get a scary sense from it until the end.
In all of the other stories I saw a connection with the elements of the macabre that can be seen in all of the stories or at least a supernatural quality. Most dealt with death but the carnival one only hints at more sinister idea with the missing knives but no one dies in it.