Survival Mechanisms

THE GATE SHOWS YOU HOW TO DEPART PREMATURELY. There's a specific kind of broken thing in your life. It's not the type of breakage that occurs abruptly. It's the kind that deteriorates gradually, over a period of years, in ways that appear normal until they don't. For Billy—whose story has haunted me for years—it was a fence. A backyard gate split open by a winter storm when he was eight years old. The gate remained broken in Billy's mind. And in that brokenness, something sh