The summer she was pregnant, she took to napping in the afternoon, slipping between the white sheets fully clothed and falling asleep with such violence it was as if her soul sprang un-tethered from her body and left it, inert and lolling as a corpse.

Melanie’s daddy once told her about a woman who’d killed her husband with a hammer as he slept.

In 1990, Jacob Mason stopped playing video games…

Several years ago, in an Ohio snowstorm, I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in a single day.