From the Notebook

The Pages I Set Aside

When I set down the Cancer Man's account, I kept the book to the story itself — the window, the darkness, the bench in the rain. But he gave me more than the story. He gave me the ground it grew from: the town, the woman, the house. I left those pages out so the telling would not slow. They are here now, for the reader who wants to stand where I stood before any of it began.

— Ernest Torrs