Essie tonged the jars into her mother’s old pressure cooker, seated the lid and set the timer. Through the kitchen window above the sink, she eyed the empty side yard.
The first time I had a gun pointed at me I was 14 and I ran home crying, and my brother laughed at me, calling me burra, saying I’d better get used to it. I didn’t know if he meant getting used to seeing guns or getting used to being stupid.
After seeing an episode of Law & Order in which a mother murdered her infant child by forcing it to swallow a kitchen sponge, forty-one-year-old Todd Melkin was even more convinced that he had a tumor in his brain.