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In the depths of a forest in Texas a married couple takes a wrong turn. Soon they are lost. Tommy and Annie, long at odds and nearing divorce, can barely stand each other's company. Now, faced with the setting sun and no civilization in sight, they approach a solitary house in a desperate search for a phone.
What they find is a paranoid old woman, her .44 pistol, her German shepherd, and a harrowing night of captivity.
Convinced the couple has come to take her castle, the old woman locks them in her home and keeps watch over them with her gun and her dog. Alternately threatening and entreating, she waffles between captor and lonely stranger longing for companionship. Annie and Tommy, who could not sit peacefully in a car, must share a mattress in a gloomy, concrete storage room.
Fearing for their lives and trapped together in the dark, they bare all the deep-seated grudges and wounds that have festered for years. In confinement, Tommy and Annie discover something they needed all along. When the ordeal comes to an end, as strangely and abruptly as it began, captor and captives are forever transformed.
Paul Ruffin was a Texas State University System Regents' Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, where he also held the title of writer in residence. The 2009 Texas poet laureate, he was the author of two novels, six collections of short stories, five books of nonfiction prose, and seven collections of poetry and the editor or coeditor of 15 other books. His work appeared widely in journals and magazines in the United States and abroad and had been featured on National Public Radio.
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