At the foot of the rest area entrance ramp, Al Andrews brought Unit 12 to a sliding stop. He got out, wincing at that terrible shrieking sound. It was like an air-raid siren broadcast through a heavy metal band’s amplifiers, he would say later. He saw a kid holding something out so it almost touched the surface of a muddy old Ford or Chevy station wagon. The boy was wincing in pain, determination, or both.

The smoking black spot on the flank of the station wagon began to spread. The white smoke curling up from it began to thicken. It turned gray, then black. What happened next happened fast. Pete saw tiny blue flames pop into being around the black spot. They spread, seeming to dance above the surface of the car-thing. It was the way charcoal briquettes looked in their backyard barbecue after their father doused them with lighter fluid and then tossed in a match.

The gooey gray tentacle, which had almost reached the sneakered foot still on the pavement, snapped back. The car yanked in upon itself again, but this time the spreading blue flames stood out all around it in a corona. It pulled in tighter and still tighter, becoming a fiery ball. Then, as Pete and the Lussier kids and Trooper Andrews watched, it shot up into the blue spring sky. For a moment longer it was there, glowing like a cinder, and then it was gone. Pete found himself thinking of the cold darkness above the envelope of the earth’s atmosphere – those endless leagues where anything might live and lurk.

I didn’t kill it, I just drove it away. It had to go so it could put itself out, like a burning stick in a bucket of water.

Trooper Andrews was staring up into the sky, dumbfounded. One of his brain’s few working circuits was wondering how he was supposed to write up a report on what he had just seen.

There were more approaching sirens in the distance.

Pete walked back to the two little kids with his saddlebag in one hand and his Richforth magnifying glass in the other. He sort of wished George and Normie were here, but so what if they weren’t? He’d had quite an afternoon for himself without those guys, and he didn’t care if he got grounded or not. This made jumping bikes off the edge of a stupid sandpit look like Sesame Street.

You know what? I fuckin rock.

He might have laughed if the little kids hadn’t been looking at him. They had just seen their parents eaten by some kind of alien – eaten alive – and showing happiness would be totally wrong.

The little boy held out his chubby arms, and Pete picked him up. He didn’t laugh when the kid kissed his cheek, but he smiled. ‘Fanks,’ Blakie said. ‘You’re a good kid.’

Pete set him down. The little girl also kissed him, which was sort of nice, although it would have been nicer if she’d been a babe.

The trooper was running toward them now, and that made Pete think of something. He bent to the little girl and huffed into her face.

‘Do you smell anything?’

Rachel Lussier looked at him for a moment, her expression far wiser than her years. ‘You’ll be okay,’ she said, and actually smiled. Not a big one, but yes – a smile. ‘Just don’t breathe on him. And maybe get some mints or something before you go home.’

‘I was thinking Teaberry gum,’ Pete said.

‘Yeah,’ Rachel said. ‘That’ll work.’

For Nye Willden and Doug Allen,

who bought my first stories.

My mother had a saying for every occasion. (‘And Steve remembers them all,’ I can hear my wife, Tabitha, say, with an accompanying roll of her eyes.)

One of her favorites was ‘Milk always takes the flavor of what it sits next to in the icebox.’ I don’t know if that’s true about milk, but it’s certainly true when it comes to the stylistic development of young writers. When I was a young man, I wrote like H. P. Lovecraft when I was reading Lovecraft, and like Ross Macdonald when I was reading the adventures of PI Lew Archer.

Stylistic copying eventually wanes. Little by little, writers develop their own styles, each as unique as a fingerprint. Traces of the writers one reads in one’s formative years remain, but the rhythm of each writer’s thoughts – an expression of his or her very brainwaves, I think – eventually becomes dominant. In the end, no one sounds like Elmore Leonard but Leonard, and no one sounds like Mark Twain but Twain. Yet every now and then stylistic copying recurs, always when the writer encounters some new and wonderful mode of expression that shows him a new way of seeing and saying. ’Salem’s Lot was written under the influence of James Dickey’s poetry, and if Rose Madder sounds in places as if it were written by Cormac McCarthy, it’s because while I was writing that book, I was reading everything by McCarthy I could get my hands on.

In 2009, an editor at The New York Times Book Review asked if I would do a double review of Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, by Carol Sklenicka, and Carver’s own collected stories, as published by Library of America. I agreed, mostly so I could explore some new territory. Although I am an omnivorous reader, I had somehow missed Carver. A large blind spot for a writer who came of literary age at roughly the same time Carver did, you might say, and you would be right. All I can say in my own defense is quot libros, quam breve tempus – so many books, so little time (and yes, I have the tee-shirt).

In any case, I was stunned by the clarity of Carver’s style, and by the beautiful tension of his prose line. Everything is on the surface, but that surface is so clear that the reader can see a living universe just beneath. I loved those stories, and I loved the American losers Carver wrote about with such knowledge and tenderness. Yes, the man was a drunk, but he had a sure touch and a great heart.

I wrote ‘Premium Harmony’ shortly after reading more than two dozen Carver stories, and it should come as no surprise that it has the feel of a Carver story. If I had written it at twenty, I think it would have been no more than a blurred copy of a much better writer. Because it was written at sixty-two, my own style bleeds through, for better or worse. Like many great American writers (Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen come to mind), Carver seemed to have little sense of humor. I, on the other hand, see the humor in almost everything. The humor here is black, but in my opinion, that’s often the best kind. Because – dig it – when it comes to death, what can you do but laugh?

Premium Harmony

They’ve been married for ten years and for a long time everything was okay – swell – but now they argue. Now they argue quite a lot. It’s really all the same argument. It has circularity. It is, Ray sometimes thinks, like a dog track. When they argue they’re like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery time after time, but you don’t see the landscape. You see the rabbit.

He thinks it might be different if they’d had kids, but she couldn’t have kids. They finally got tested, and that’s what the doctor said. It was her problem. Something in her. A year or so after that, he bought her a dog, a Jack Russell she named Biznezz. Mary would spell it for people who asked. She wants everyone to get the joke. She loves that dog, but now they argue anyway.

They’re going to Walmart for grass seed. They’ve decided to sell the house – they can’t afford to keep it – but Mary says they won’t get far until they do something about the plumbing and make the lawn nice. She says those bald patches make it look shanty Irish. It’s been a hot summer with no rain to speak of. Ray tells her grass seed won’t grow the lawn without rain no matter how good the grass seed is. He says they should wait.