The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

In 1999, while taking a walk near my home, I was hit by a guy driving a van. He was doing about forty, and the collision should have killed me. I guess I must have taken some sort of half-assed evasive action at the last moment, although I don’t remember doing that. What I do remember is the aftermath. An event that occurred in two or three seconds beside a rural Maine highway resulted in two or three years of physical therapy and slow rehabilitation. During those long months spent recovering some range of movement in my right leg and then learning to walk again, I had plenty of time to reflect on what some philosophers have called ‘the problem of pain.’

This story is about that, and I wrote it years later, when the worst of my own pain had receded to a steady low mutter. Like several other stories in this book, ‘The Little Green God of Agony’ is a search for closure. But, like all the stories in this book, its principal purpose is to entertain. Although life experiences are the basis of all stories, I’m not in the business of confessional fiction.