Megan Kruse’s short story “The Boy” in the story collection Mud Flat Shorts (mostly fiction) is a haunting story that will stay with you long after you finish reading it, a story you’ll want to read again.
A young American soldier named Chester is stationed near the river Anapo in Italy. Despite the camaraderie of the other soldiers in his unit, Chester is alone, a misfit. He does not join the others on their drunken trip into town.
One day while sitting under an olive tree watching a local farmer at work, a boy wearing an apple-green cap walks by, and watching the boy sends Chester back to reveries of his boyhood in Indiana and later in Ohio, where he is sent to live with an aunt and uncle he never met.
We see Chester as alone among others, as much a misfit at home as he is in the war as Kruse skillfully goes back and forth from Italy to Chester’s boyhood in the Midwest. It is a beautifully constructed story that everyone may relate to. Have we not all felt alone in a crowd, among colleagues, with sisters and cousins; or struggled with feelings of guilt over things for which we may or may not have been responsible?
“The Boy” is included in the anthology Mud Flat Shorts (mostly fiction), a collection of 31 stories by 19 writers including, in addition to Kruse, New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer-Prize nominee Jack Butler; O. Henry Award and Big Muddy magazine’s Mighty River Short Story Prize winner Keith Eisner; one by National bestselling author of The Eagle Tree, Ned Hayes; plus stories by Dawud H. Al-Malik, Jenni Prange Boran, Christian Carvajal, Alec Clayton, CK Combs, John Knold as Tracy Gunn, Meenu Madhavan, Shree Nath, Anne Nayer, James O’Barr, James Robert Peery, Jes Simmons, Samuel Snoek-Brown, James P. Stuart, and Ricker Winsor.
Megan Kruse grew up in the Pacific Northwest, studied creative writing at Oberlin College, and earned her MFA at the University of Montana. She is the author of Call Me Home, published by Hawthorne Books in 2015 with an introduction by Elizabeth Gilbert. She was one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for 2015, and a recipient of the 2016 Pacific Northwest Book Award. She currently lives in Olympia, Washington and teaches fiction for the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University. She is at work on a second novel.
Learn more about Mud Flat Shorts (mostly fiction) at https://mudflatpress.com/mud-flat-shorts-mostly-fiction/