The boy was six years old. He wrote, “They went behind a rock to have a think.”
The boy’s father was a novelist.
The boy’s heroes were cowboys in pursuit of a gang of rustlers. The boy didn’t yet know where the outlaws were hiding.
Sixty years later, the grown man writes, “The boy was six years old. The outlaws were hiding in his head.”
He’d still like to be a novelist himself one day.
Max Harris was born in England, received his PhD from the University of Virginia, and now lives in Wisconsin. His short stories have been published in A capella Zoo, Amoskeag, and/or, Flash Fiction Magazine, HOOT, and other journals later in the alphabet. He has won the Wisconsin Academy Review/Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops Short Story Contest and the rather more scholarly Otto Gründler Book Prize.
A Quiet Courage 