Boy

by Maddie King

Every person was a ‘boy’ no matter who it was. A ‘boy’ would take us to Etna, if we asked. Another ‘boy’ could sell us black-rock bracelets from the base; they were cheap, only 15 lira. A certain 'boy' scaled the side of the crater every day to look into its depths and every day would climb back down to tell everyone that the volcano was still dead. This boy’s father had held this job until 1949, when lava had flowed down to Randazzo (“where the allied beetches come”). A few years later, ash clouds spread as far as Libya.

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Maddie King is a writer and filmmaker living in Portland, Maine. Her short fiction has been published in HOOT, Fleas on the Dog, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. Once, she had a dream about setting up a palmistry practice by a lake. It didn’t impact the course of her life, but it sometimes amuses her to think about a version in which it had.