Famous First Words

You think you know about pain?

Talk to my second wife.She does. Or she thinks she does.

She says that once when she was nineteen or twenty she got between a couple of cats fighting—her own cat and a neighbor’s—and one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and belly that you still can see today, scared her so badly she fell back against her mother’s turn-of-the-century Hoosier, breaking her best ceramic pie plate and scraping six inches of skin off her ribs while the cat made its way back down her again, all tooth and claw and spitting fury.Thirty-six stitches I think she said she got.And a fever that lasted days.

My second wife says that’s pain.

She doesn’t know shit, that woman.

The Girl Next Door. Jack Ketchum.