You know how it is when the house gets so quiet you can hear the wood settling in the walls, like the house itself is sighing because it’s tired of holding everything up? It’s 2:18 AM and the crickets out by the old tractor are doing that rhythmic thing—I think it’s called stridulation, technically—and you’re just sitting there with your face in the blue light of the monitor. People see me at the Piggly Wiggly and they see a cardigan and a sensible bun, they see someone who makes lemon bars for the church bake sale, but they don't see the Razer Kraken headset or the way my fingers find the WASD keys like it’s muscle memory from a different life. Sometimes you just have to be someone who can fight back, because in a town like this, where everyone remembers you as a toddler and then a bride and then a widow, you’re basically just a ghost that hasn’t stopped walking yet. My Arthur, he used to say I had a hyper-vigilant temperament—that was his word, he worked in the clinic over in Oakhaven for thirty-one years—and I suppose he was right because even back then I’d be up counting the heartbeats of the house. He died four years, seven months, and twelve days ago, and after the funeral, the silence was just… it was a clinical depression, I suppose, a real sense of anhedonia where nothing tasted like anything anymore. But then my grandson left his old rig here because he said the internet out here was too slow for his 'pro-grinding' or whatever he called it, and I found out that if I clicked the blue switches on this mechanical keyboard—they’re Cherry MX Blues, very clicky, very tactile—it sounded like someone was actually doing something in the next room. It sounds like life. You ever feel that rush when the circle starts closing in?