A Tree or a Person or a Wall

In "A Tree or a Person or a Wall," a young boy is held prisoner by "the man with rough hands,",who traps the boy in a locked room with an albino ape, his only companion and a seeming conspirator in his captivity. As the boy attempts to befriend this animal, begging for its help, he also loses his tenuous grasp on reality, until all that remains is a terrible sound, began upon the ape's lips and now screeching through the boy's skull, and also some unclear object seen through a distant dirty window, a tree or a person or a wall that might or might not hold the clue to his escape.

Matt Bell is the author of HOW THEY WERE FOUND, published in October 2010, as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts, The Collectors, and How the Broken Lead the Blind. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden's Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is also the editor of The Collagist and of Dzanc's Best of the Web anthology series. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife Jessica,