From Heartbreaker. Published by HarperCollins in 2018.

The north highway cuts a straight line through town, and this is where you will find most of our local businesses. The residential streets branch off from the north highway in a grid. They are not named. In the territory, we go by bungalow number. Lana’s is 2. Neon Dean’s is 17. Ours is 88. Guess how many bungalows are in the territory? Exactly. One of my favourite jokes is to pretend I’m lost. I will be riding my ten-speed in my mother’s powder-blue workdress, her purse strapped across my body and her ATV helmet on, and I’ll see someone at the edge of their property, and I’ll flag them down and say, Yeah, so, hey, there I was on the north highway, made a couple of turns, and now I am just all spun around. Just totally lost. Cannot seem to find my way back home.

Bungalow after bungalow, built all at once when the territory began. Small cement porches. Snowmobiles and swing sets in the yards, and the girls with show hair long like their mothers’, long like their dogs’, and the men and boys shaved to near bald. Let me give you the lay of the land. The men love to start a lecture this way. Our dogs are white here, and there are no leashes. It is acceptable to make a leash-like mechanism for your children, but not for your dog. Your dog is an animal and to forget her nature is to forget your own. If you would like to see a dog on a leash, turn on your television. We will barbecue under a tarpaulin for our dogs in the dead of winter, but we will not give them names. You. Come. Here. Get. Names are for our people not our dogs. If you would like to see a dog with a name, watch Lassie. It’s on at four. Duct tape in medicine cabinets. Radios with batteries carried from room to room. Always the sound of a truck in the distance. Knowing the trucks by sound. Who is approaching. Who is not going home. Deadbolts on garage doors. A bear on your property after the thaw. Motion-detector light. Gunshot. Beards a sign of mental damage. Gunshot. Tanning beds in our sunken dens, and many of our people the shade of anger. Smelling like coconut oil in line at Value Smoke and Grocer. None of the men going by their birth names. Wishbone, Sexeteria, Hot Dollar, Fur Thumb, Visible Thinker, Traps. The Heavy. Let me give you the lay of the land: men, women, children, loaded rifles. Hearts stop. Dogs, trucks, winter, fucking. Hearts break.

See that lone white bungalow? Now, see the lone window looking out from beneath the roof on the south-facing wall, the one with the black sheet for a curtain that appears to have a single word spelled out in duct tape? That is my bedroom and the word is b e y o n d. From below, you can only really make out y o, message enough.

We have a travel agent though no one has ever left the territory. We call her One Hundred as she is either very close to or just past that in years. She has been here from the beginning. Her left pupil is wiped out and translucent with blindness, but otherwise, she is more fit than most and works nights in the back of Drink Mart at a card table on a foldout chair. If you buy her a drink, she will pull out one of her four black gym bags, unzip it slowly, and show you her away pamphlets. The gym bags are called North, South, East, and West. Given the North is all we know, no one chooses North and it is clear that bag is empty. South, East, and West our broadest men can barely bench-press.

In the cold months, we can’t bury our dead. Our people try to die in the summer. If you don’t, your body is put on a cot and wheeled into the walk-in freezer of the Death Man’s shed, a square of lumber, fiberglass, and Freon tubing twenty steps from the sliding back doors of his well-maintained trailer. He has gulls on his property though he is nowhere near water. While the Death Man is soundless, his gulls whine and screech and dirty themselves, and we tell them, Stop your commotion, we know what mourning is.

We all find it difficult to look at the Death Man when he walks by us in town. The dead have their secrets and he knows them. His bullet eyes, his bleach vapor, his unmarried, mannequin hands. If you die, the Death Man will be the last to touch your naked body with all its private codes. Not your mother, not your girlfriend, but the Death Man and his indoor gloves. The thinking is: Normal men volunteer to fuck women or fight fires, not store the dead.