The Question of Where We Begin

The opening story from Kyle Minor's Praying Drunk, available in February from Sarabande Books.

"Perhaps he would never have been physically violent with her if his brain chemistry had not been altered by the city dump truck that hit him twenty years earlier. So perhaps we begin at his old house, in the morning, him buttoning his workshirt, smoothing the patch that bears his name on the pocket of his workshirt. Perhaps our story is about the workings of chance. What if he had stopped or not stopped this particular morning to get coffee? What if he had ordered two hash browns in the McDonald’s drive thru instead of one hash brown, but had to wait a little longer for his order, since only one hash brown was ready, and the second hash brown was still in the fryer?"