Considered by George Saunders as possibly the best short story ever, it’s another expertly rendered tale that upends the reader. ‘The Stone Boy’ is about two brothers, on their way to pick peas, when the lives of the family change in a second. From the get-go, Berriault lays narrative clues and red herrings which keep the reader on edge as to what is really happening.
What’s so heartrending is the emotional temperature of the story, how it must be one of the worst things to happen when a child dies but in this case is killed by another child. Made worse as siblings? What would you do? How would you react as a child or as a parent? I keep thinking about that. The dreadful pull between love and loss. The story is not so much about the death itself but about the reactions afterwards.
First published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1957 and collected in The Mistress and Other Short Stories, Dutton & Co., and later in Women in Their Beds, Counterpoint, 1996
A Personal Anthology 