Miriam hated it when Jack was judgmental, and Jack was judgmental a great deal. She herself stole on occasion, mostly sheets. For some reason, it was easy to steal sheets. As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.

But eventually Jack’s lack of success began to vex him. Miriam and the lamp continued to wait solemnly for his empty-handed return. He grew irritable. Sometimes he would forget to wash off his camouflage paint, and he slept poorly. Then, late one afternoon when Jack was out in the woods, he fell asleep in his stand and toppled out of a tree, critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passed through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe. A large portion of his brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent’s coat. A month later, he could walk with difficulty and move one arm. He had some vision out of his remaining eye and he could hear but not speak. He emerged from rehab with a face as expressionless as a frosted cake. He was something that had suffered a premature burial, something accounted for but not present. Miriam was certain that he was aware of the morbid irony in this.

[...] The taxidermist was a genius. He couldn’t make an animal look dead if he wanted to.