I don't really know why I’m typing this out now, except that it’s nearly three in the morning and the wind is coming off the north pasture in a way that makes the whole house feel thin, like it might just blow away. I’m seventy-six years old and I’ve spent my whole life in this county, except for those four years when I went across the state line for my degree—my father didn’t want me to go, he said it was a waste of perfectly good tuition money when I could just marry the Miller boy, but I went anyway. I remember the drive home for the weekends was three hours on two-lane roads and the heater in that old Ford barely worked. Anyway, I was thinking about my final year, the big presentation we had to do in the amphitheater—it was for a course on the biological imperatives of social structures—and how it felt to stand there in front of everyone. I remember it was so quiet in that hall you could hear the blood rushing in your ears, just a hum, like a transformer on a pole. The man—the one in charge of the department, he was very well-respected in town and his family owned the hardware store back home—he was sitting right in the front row with his arms crossed. He had these very thick, rectangular glasses that caught the light so you couldn't see his eyes, just two white squares. I was standing at the mahogany podium, my notes were all damp from my hands, and I had just finished explaining the sympathetic nervous system’s role in acute stress—what they call the fight or flight response, though it’s more complicated than that. And right then, in the middle of a sentence about the adrenal medulla, this... this THING just rose up in me. It was like a physical weight in my throat. It’s called an intrusive thought, I know that now, a sort of cognitive dissonance where your brain presents the absolute worst possible action just to test your restraint.