It was a point of pride to the citizens of Mattingly, Virginia, that our town was the most boring twenty square miles on the planet. The running joke was that Mayor Jim Willis should have that printed on a sign at the town limits for everyone to see. Something simple and honest, just as we all were—Welcome to Mattingly, Where Nothing Ever Happens. What had happened the previous weekend had never occurred in our town, and thank God for that. That’s why the headline in the following Monday’s Gazette was the size normally reserved for catastrophes and political elections (which, to Mattingly folk, were usually one and the same). ONE DEAD, ONE SOUGHT IN GAS STATION ROBBERY, the banner read. The subtitle—shocking act leaves owner hospitalized—summarized the 893 words of the piece that took up the entire front page and most of page two as well.

It was much later that I read the article and the two dozen or so others written over the weeks and months after the incident. I still have them pasted into a scrapbook that sits on the shelf in my living room. The facts of the story are all there, the who and what and when. Not the why, though. Like most things in this life, the why came later.

At the time I was giving no thought to headlines or justice. I was in the black then, left to wander through a strange land spread out inside me, an in-between place that was not as bad as hell but not as good as heaven. Confusion and unconsciousness didn’t imprison me as much as they provided comfort. They were another bandage to cover another wound that could have just as easily festered into death. Many of the townspeople trickled in and out of my room