Adonijah sets out into the cold cold night to retrieve his drunk step-dad.

(from Town Smokes)

This story was more sensitive, more careful, more complicated, more harsh than it first appeared to be. Unlike the other stories I’ve read in this collection so far, this one had no quotation marks. The dialog was set off by commas at best, and frequently employed that sort of phonetic, Twainian way of doing a dialect. Puts you right into the mind of our narrator from the get-go.