It was getting late and everyone was telling their gun stories. Times they’d had a gun pulled on them, almost been shot, or, for just a couple of people, times they actually had been hit with a bullet . . .

For seventeen convoys, in the helpless passenger seat behind layered glass and the streaming world, he said nothing when things went antic. He said nothing when their truck fell behind and out of radio range. He . . .

The surgeons weren’t successful. He could tell from the way Ma stroked his left hand. It was the same hand she’d tied down when he learned to write. Chinese parents never held hands, just as they never said I love you . . .

You read how in sieged cities hungry people gnaw wood, boil leather, hallucinate. So it makes sense when your children’s emptiness makes you crazed, unsteady, makes you line the inside of your shirt with whatever . . .

Dichosofui Manuel now lived off a switchback path near the old coffee fincas, a place where radio signals got lost between the mountains. Handwritten and misspelled signs offered “tortiyas,” little stores . . .

She is making me a birthday cake and doesn’t yet know that she’ll probably throw it at me. In about fifty minutes’ time, perhaps an hour, our marriage will be over. She smiles fleetingly, more sensing than looking at me . . .