Desolations of Devil's Acre

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of those came as a terrible shock and, like anything else that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After."

When I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.

All I could think was that grandfathers were supposed to die in beds, in hushed places humming with machines, not in heaps on the sodden reeking ground with ants marching over them, a brass letter opener clutched in one trembling hand.