A Boy and a Girl
 

A Boy and a Girl

The soldiers let the boy and a few other children from the village stand nearby to watch the executions. The soldiers had been told to make the children go away, but they knew the children would watch anyway from the cover of the jungle. After the bullets exploded, the male prisoners bound to three of the posts hung limply dead against their ropes while blood spread across their shirts. The woman tied to the fourth post was still standing physically unscathed. She began weeping and shaking even though she was blindfolded and unable to see her fallen companions.

The soldiers scanned the road to doublecheck that the officers who approved the final order had driven away. They grabbed the arms of the two village council elders assigned to observe procedures and pulled them toward the posts. Both elders protested they had done nothing except ask for time to pray. The elder who was most shrill and loud was struck in the head by a rifle butt and after falling was yanked back to his feet and pushed forward. The soldiers cut two of the dead men loose. The bodies, hands and feet still tied, one of them blindfolded, twisted to the ground. The heads of the dead men flopped on their necks like puppets’ heads and thudded on the packed sand of the roadway that ran in front of the line of posts.

One of the dead men, the boy’s uncle, had refused a blindfold. He lay now eyes open, face-on to the children. The uncle had beaten the boy earlier in the week for stealing fish from the lines the uncle set hanging from limbs overarching the river. Just as the soldiers were raising their guns the uncle had glanced at the boy and smiled thinly, knowingly, but now his lips shaped an O like a foundered carp as his face pressed the ground. The uncle had beaten and scolded the boy several times since the boy’s father died in the first revolt following the massacre at the picket line during the farm workers’s strike. The boy’s mother, who lately had been sleeping in the uncle’s hut, had cast her eyes down and said nothing as the uncle cuffed the boy’s head and cracked a green piece of cane against the back of his legs.

The soldiers steered the elders between the dead men and tied them with their torsos in line with the splintered sections of the newly empty posts. They gagged the louder elder who now was moaning. One soldier cut the rope that held the woman to her post. She was from a distant village and had been a servant to the dead Christian missionary still roped to a post. The soldier led the blindfolded servant woman by the hand into the back of the military transport truck. None of the soldiers tried to make the children go away, but the children left by choice as the elders were being blindfolded because they did not want to be witnesses even though they were not afraid of the soldiers—sometimes the soldiers gave them candy and even paper money when the children told them who in the village had spoken out against the president or his government. This is what the children had been taught to do in school. Among their teachers, only the missionary had refused to teach them this.

The children did not watch the executions of the elders, even from the jungle, but they heard the rifle shots despite the jungle in-between and listened as raucous birds again lifted from the trees and as small macaque monkeys unseen high in the trees began once more to shriek and chatter. The children had heard the startled flutter of birds and the clamor of alarmed macaques all their lives. The little animals were weak and noisy. The animals raised the same fuss whether a big snake was motionlessly wound around some nearby limb; whether, the wash ladies balancing baskets of laundry on their heads were gossiping and laughing on the trail to the river; or, whether, a military transport was rumbling past. Just because birds went flying or monkeys began crying did not prove a hungry tiger was waiting within the jungle for a child working in a field to come carelessly closer. The children always tried to be strong like they were taught, and to never behave foolishly like jabbering monkeys; and after all, the soldiers were always close by to protect them.

The children were returned to the village and playing a made-up game of hitting nuts across bare ground with sticks when they heard the next set of shots. The boy stuck his arm into a patch of young bamboo spreading near the water well and, shouting for help, frantically struck the thick growth with his stick while pretending he was being dragged into the mother jungle. The other children laughed and kept playing their game, but then one, the oldest girl—the one whose long, clean hair shone in the sun and whose legs were as liquid and limber as a cat’s, the one the boy thought about when he masturbated—shook her finger, admonishing him without smiling, and told him that his uncle had been a brave man and that only a stupid boy would sell fish to the army cook.

Hi Jim.

I won't say I enjoyed the story, but it did hold my attention to the end.

Given the title I didn't think it 'fair' to leave the introduction of the girl until the final sentence. Also some of the details there make me revise my age estimate of the boy from the opening, how much of a 'child' was he? And if he's a bit older, and she's older than him, and attractive, then why isn't she put in a truck along with the servant girl?

Similarly, that one of the executed was the boy's uncle is revealed when it doesn't really have much (emotional) impact. (And why are the other victims anonymous? Surely they'd be know to the children? How big is the village?)

There's also the mystery of who returned the children to the village (or did I miss something?)

I think it might benefit from some vigorous pruning. Two examples,

The woman tied to the fourth post was still standing physically unscathed. She began weeping and shaking even though she was blindfolded and unable to see her fallen companions.

Does 'blindfolded' really need to be explained? And if, earlier in the paragraph, it was established that all were tied to posts that wouldn't be a detail that needed repeating.

I also think starting with the uncle refusing the blindfold and the boy watching him do so might be stronger opening.

Second,

The soldiers scanned the road to doublecheck that the officers who approved the final order had driven away.

What does this detail have to the with the boy (assuming he's the focus of the narrative?)

Perhaps consider swapping some of 'the soldiers' for a single NCO? Would all the soldiers really be 'scanning the road' at the start of P2 (who's watching the villagers/prisoners?)

Given how little reaction the children seem to show, why would the soldiers think they'd want to watch from the jungle?

That 'did not want to be witnesses' is interesting.

Lastly, I think you could cut P5 entirely. It doesn't add anything (is probably inaccurate about macaque alarm calls being all the same) and the ironic ending, the protective soldiers, feels laboured.

'Selling Fish' might make a good title.

RG.

Again, thanks. I find that sometimes my initial reaction to crits changes later. The thing to always remember as the writer is that a reader's first impression will always be what it is. The fact you got through to the end is hopeful though, isn't it?

Jim

Hi Jim.

Can a badly told story hold someone's attention simply by being bad?
It wasn't 'bad' that held my attention, I wanted to know how things ended.

The fact you got through to the end is hopeful though, isn't it?
The set up makes one want to.

RG.

Hi, Jim—

Very impressive and well-crafted story. I especially like the way you use your detached, third-person narration limited to the boy’s thoughts. You identify the girl as your “true protagonist,” meaning, I suppose, that she represents the values promoted by the story, but the way you reveal the layers of the unnamed boy was mesmerizing. His actions were monstrous, and his lack of remorse is shocking until the reader understands that his society has warped him and stolen his humanity. The restrained, almost matter-of-fact tone effectively underscores the boy’s conditioned lack of compassion.

Equally effective is the narrator’s careful, anthropological focus on the behavior of the children during the horrific scene.

I suspect that you intended the title to be misleading. It seems to promise a romance and delivers something completely different. Richard’s suggestion of “Selling Fish” might be a good title, or perhaps “Settling Scores.”

Fine work!

Glenn

Hi Glenn,

Thanks for your generous reading. I was trying to write this in an unbiased reportorial tone and I am happy you caught that. I called the girl the protagonist and that is actually a reach. She was not even in the story's first draft. The other children were simply ignoring the boy's antics while they heard additional shots in the distance. Once I added her without having her appear earlier in the story I knew she might seem a tangent or an afterthought so I started to recompose the beginning of the story. The title came first, but then I thought why not just leave it like that as sort of an experiment with the narrative. My reasoning was that I was trying to thwart reader expectations throughout anyway so why not keep doing it, but I want to play fairly with readers in keeping a cohesive narrative at least, so will try to come up with a different title or go back and get the girl into the story in the beginning. I have never submitted a piece of flash fiction for possible publication. Richard has suggested fleshing out my characters and adding dialogue, two things I always find crucial to a good story. I intentionally left them out of this to create that sense of distant objectivity that I was seeking. Still, I am mulling over some changes.

All the best,
Jim

Hi Jim,

This held my interest throughout. I say it's well worth working on some more. My reading here is that the boy in question has informed on his uncle in revenge for being beaten by him for stealing fish and because his mother is now sleeping with him.

I don't quite understand why the soldiers check the officers are gone before they shoot the village elders. Because the officers would have stopped them doing this? But then, the village elders' deaths would have been hard to cover up. I'd wondered if they were checking that the officers were gone before they revealed the woman was alive and contrary to orders had not (yet) been killed. She will, I presume, be killed later, after she's been raped, and then the officers would be none the wiser. But it does read like they are making sure the officers are gone before they kill the elders. And the children don't want to witnesses, so presumably the soldiers are doing something they shouldn't here and are taking a significant risk here -- a risk big enough that witnesses might be in danger of being silenced. But whether it's the rape of the woman (perhaps they won't kill her afterwards and that's what they might want to cover up?) or the killing of the elders, is unclear to me. I'd prefer to clearer on this.

The penultimate paragraph tells us: "The children always tried to be strong like they were taught, and to never behave foolishly like jabbering monkeys", but this is contradicted in the next paragraph where, "The boy stuck his arm into a patch of young bamboo spreading near the water well and, shouting for help, frantically struck the thick growth with his stick while pretending he was being dragged into the mother jungle". Is this for effect? I don't understand what.

At the close, I don't understand why the girl says that "only a stupid boy would sell fish to the army cook". Clearly this is what the boy has done with the fish he stole from his uncle, but are we supposed to know why that's stupid? Is the implication that the boy selling the uncle's fish has got the uncle killed. Maybe the fish were bad? I'd assumed, as above, the boy had gotten his uncle killed in revenge the beating (and the uncle sleeping with his mother).

"The soldiers steered the elders between the dead men and tied them with their torsos in line with the splintered sections of the newly empty posts." -- I don't understand this sentence. I can't picture it. I don't think I'm given enough information. Where are they elders tied? To the posts? But if the posts have been shattered, how does that work. Or are they tied elsewhere, but "in line" with the posts? In which case, where are they tied?

I'd lose the final 's' from "farm workers’s"

Craftwise, I'd say there's a fair bit of scope for condensing this: information that's given twice, has already been implied etc.

For example, in the first paragraph, do you need the first sentence? The second sentence seems to imply everything in the first. If you explain that the three men are tied to the posts do you need to also say the woman is? So this could be:

The soldiers let the boy and a few other children from the village stand nearby to watch the executions. The soldiers had been told to make the children go away, but they knew the children would watch anyway from the cover of the jungle. After the bullets exploded, the [three] male prisoners bound to three of the posts hung limply dead against their ropes while blood spread across their shirts. The woman tied to the fourth post was still standing [and] physically unscathed. She began weeping and shaking even though she was blindfolded and unable to see her fallen companions.

Note that in the fourth para you again say that the woman is blindfolded. And in the second para, for example, do you need to mention that only one of the two was blindfolded, when in the third para you'll explain that one of them refused a blindfold? And so on.

best,

Matt

Belated reply.