“Head of a Boy,” oil on canvas, by Gottlieb Schick, 1802.
The boy was holding a balloon. That’s what everyone could agree on—he’d been walking along the edge of the wall, atop the soot-stained balustrade, and he’d been holding a red balloon.
No, a pink balloon, said the man who sold arancini at the cart near the entrance of the park.
There was no doubt it was blue, from the woman who’d been walking her bichon near the fall.
The little girl who’d been swinging on the derelict old swing set (which the town council had been rallying to remove for several years now) said that the adults were all wrong, that the balloon had been the color of raspberries when you mash them into the bottom of your bowl, and that she had gotten a splinter from the swing seat.
Whatever the color, there had been a balloon. There had been a boy. And there had been a fall.
The sky had turned its eight thousand shades of crimson and purple, before it happened. Really, everyone agreed, it was too late for children to be out at the promenade (this, with a judgmental glance at the little girl’s mother, who was rumored to be no better than she should be). The working men had cleared the streets for their dinners; the babies were in bed, dreaming their sunset dreams.
Someone, though, had not understood the meaning of conscionable time. Someone had allowed their son to play out on the city streets, to play atop walls, to slip at the place where the stone grew slick and mossy.
In the absence of any other information, they agreed that the child must be an outsider. Any of their children, should they be atop the balustrade in the first place, would never skip on that particularly traitorous stretch of stone, knowing full well that the sea air hummed up off the rocks below to create a damp and slippery sheen just there, next to the third bench of the promenade. Any of their children would understand the inherent risk of holding to a balloon, one hand incautiously distracted; they would surely never walk without two feet and full focus planted firmly on the narrow beam below them.
The butcher’s wife, who had not seen the fall but who had come by at the sound of commotion, had been heard to cluck distastefully—her husband knew the chief of carabinieri, who’d said that the boy had been dressed in cheap wool shorts and a ratty old cardigan, with a tiny cap on his head. Shorts, in the middle of October; all she could say was that no child of hers would be seen in the middle of winter, half-dressed.
Or, it was to be presumed, walking on top of a balustrade, with no one to watch him, said the florist, who was known to be a particularly spiteful man.
It goes without saying, sniffed the butcher’s wife, before remembering a prior engagement.
The florist’s daughter, as it happened, had been the first to come upon the crumpled little body, broken on the shoals under the promenade’s walls. She’d been boating with her paramour, ignored his horrified protests, and steered them to the boy. When the more sentimental members of the crowd asked if she’d attempted resuscitation, the practical florist’s daughter had replied simply—it was obvious that no efforts in that direction would be needed, since the boy’s skull had been crushed in by the rocks.
She did not relay that she had, in a moment of unusual sensitivity, plucked the little boy’s hat from where it lay perched on a shoal; she imagined it had floated down after him, taking its time to descend, whereas the boy’s body had plummeted in no time flat. The hat was well-mended and sturdy, the sort of thing you’d find in an old antique shop.
The police had inspected the hat for any identifying details, and found none; when they’d turned their backs to address the medical officer, she snatched the hat from the table and shoved it in her purse. It was illogical, of course, but she suddenly could not abide the thought of the lonely little hat sitting, bagged, in a cold evidence drawer.
One young police officer, new to the force, had had the brilliant idea to canvas the balloon sellers in a two-mile radius; the buoyancy of the thing, as reported by spectators, ensured that the balloon could not have traveled far from its origins.
The balloon sellers, to a man, claimed that they had sold no balloons to a child of such description, poor little tyke. October was not a brisk time in the balloon trade. They also found it unlikely that the child would have bought a balloon and inflated it himself; when this tack was suggested, they smirked knowingly at the carabinieri, as though these starched shirts would never have any idea of the mystery and the majesty of their trade.
Only the florist’s daughter was left to think, that night, after the boy’s body had been cut open and investigated, his description posted on flyers and news alerts, his little form locked safely away in a drawer and tucked in to sleep under a paper blanket, at the ugly truth of it all—that the juxtaposition in the sight, the boy’s body tumbling through the air and the flight of the balloon, tinted fire-heart red by the last flicks of the sun, up into the half-shadowed sky, was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.
Lauren Lynn Matheny is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Colorado State University in 2018. Her work has won prizes from Third Coast Magazine and Literal Latte.
Beautifully done through and through.
Loved your writing style!
Sort of a refined “Ode to Billy Joe” with a beautifully visual twist at the end. So much indifference. Elegant tale.
A surprisingly impactful and beautiful tale of a terrible tragedy, punctuated by the juxtaposition of the falling boy and the floating balloon. There will be more from this writer.
This is what they chose as the winner? I am utterly perplexed. It’s overly wordy, quite uncompelling and contains basic punctuation errors including an errant apostrophe. It’s really more of a writing exercise than a short story.
I thought the story was also a beautiful tale of a tragedy and a sad observation of our indifference to such tragedy.
It is unfortunate that it is a little ‘wordy’ and that there are punctuation errors. There is also an inaccuracy to consider. A shoal is a submerged sandbank or gravel bank, causing a shallow section in a body of water. It would certainly not be used to describe rocks or a rocky shore above the waterline, as was the case in this tale. This should not detract too much from an otherwise well observed story.
Such a beautiful, impactful little story. It will follow me around and I will think about it for a long time. My life is enriched just a little bit more from having read it. I can’t wait to see what else the author creates.
I liked the author’s writing style. However, there were punctuation errors and I found the story perplexing. An unsupervised little boy falls off a slippery wall and is killed. Sad, but I didn’t feel there was a complete story here. It was visually entertaining but didn’t reach me.
There is a wonderful fluency to this writing and story where a whole subtext of judgment is exposed and blame apportioned in ignorance of anything at all, including actually seeing the incident. I don’t know what I expected at the end but I felt the shock of it; it’s a shock almost all creatives understand – the unspeakable aesthetics of disaster. This, to me, is the story; the juxtaposition of focused superficiality with private but irrelevant – to the boy – depth, and how we might judge those two positions.
I’m sorry, that’s wrong. Commas should be used when there is an implied breath pause if the sentence were to be read aloud. They are not to be used if there is no breath pause.
HERE IS ONE EXAMPLE of incorrect commas usage in the piece:
“…it was obvious that no efforts in that direction would be needed, since the boy’s skull had been crushed in by the rocks.”
There are more mistakes, perhaps read it again?
If I were reading that sentence out loud I would pause briefly after the word “needed.” You say you wouldn’t. Neither of us is wrong; it’s a question of style.
The decision whether to accept or reject a submission, or to award a prize, is necessarily subjective. As can be seen in the comments to this post, some people love the story, some question why it was chosen. That will be the case no matter the story, no matter the journal in which it appears. Every experienced writer knows the discomfort of having her work rejected and afterwards reading, in disbelief, what was accepted instead.
All you can do is move on. Focus on your own writing. Keep submitting.
Sure, I’m not trying at all to be troublesome but the word ‘since’ is used as a conjunction and one should never use both a comma and a conjunction to separate clauses in a sentence. It’s a rule I have learned and applied in over 25 years of print journalism.
Anyway, enough said and best of luck the with literary review.
Beautifully written. How the society in this story quibbles over the color of the balloon when a boy has been killed is so thoughtfully positioned in this story with so much impact.
Loved it. I can see these characters blaming this boy & his parents who are outsiders to their Italian village by the sea. It helps with the horror & anger.
I’ll carry the final image with me.
Love the story for its rich sensuality and for, as another commenter pointed out, exposing pointless blame. To my ear, the ending portrayed awe, the way we sometimes cannot turn our gaze from a wildfire that remains beautiful, despite its destruction. Great story.
This story was breathtaking and heartbreaking, carried so much weight between the lines. Everything about this captured so well the self-absorption and judgement we apply to the things we can’t understand or control. Bloody good work.
The narrative style was partly journalistic- collecting pieces from many sources. The last line hits you hard.