About three months ago, I wrote a story—a short story—about a childhood episode (“the Nikki incident”, I sometimes call it) that ended up having enormous influence on my life. Emerging from a period in which I got divorced, moved into a place of my own for the first time in a decade, and began re-thinking just about everything, it seemed to be the right time to confront—and dispose of—this difficult memory and what I had allowed it to do to me.

However, as the movie Magnolia puts it, “we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” Continue reading