Aalla is maybe twelve years old. That is how he puts it: Not “eleven going on twelve” or “almost thirteen” but “maybe twelve.” No one really knows, exactly. He is a bright boy whose face, flushed from the chill of the desert night, is at this moment fixed in a quarter-smile, placid almost to the point of blankness. But he is full of questions, delivered in a staccato Berber dialect that sounds almost like stuttering, which reveal a ... Read More

- From “A Night With the Aallas,” by Alan Huffman, unpublished