A foreign born individual did come to me many years ago, badly wounded from a drug incident involving her brother-in-law out in Arizona.  I’d seen her in our small city emergency department in the northern Midwest, many months after the original shooting.  And I wound up directing her care for many months.  She had two small children, and she was utterly disabled from her attack.  Her husband left her, and I always felt so badly about her circumstances.   She lost her children to the care of relatives, and drifted away.  Maybe still in a nursing home facility elsewhere, perhaps by now deceased. 

Anyhow, one day some years later, I sat in front of my wife’s sister’s home in New Mexico, watching dozens of freight trains pass back and forth along side the I 10 interstate from Houston to Los Angeles.  And I began thinking, what if…  Then I came home and wrote this tale.