Ray had been a steelworker for eighteen years. When the plant closed, he was forty and his knees were shot and his wife Shelly was from the hills of Tennessee and neither of them knew what to do next.

They lived in a trailer park off Route 46 in Youngstown. The park had seventeen units, half of them empty, the rest occupied by people who were either too poor to leave or too tired to try. Ray was both.

Shelly's father had been an amateur snake hunter. He'd spend his weekends in the hills around Tennessee, catching copperheads and timber rattlers and sending them to museums or collectors or people who paid money for dead snakes. He died when a copperhead bit him in his own backyard. The ambulance came too late.

After the funeral, Shelly found a box in his closet. Inside were things he'd collected over the years: skins, skeletons, teeth, and one small glass vial containing a crystalline substance the colour of dark honey.

"What's this?" Ray asked, looking at it while Shelly was in the other room.

She came back, looked at it, and said, "I don't know. Some kind of souvenir, I guess."

She put it in her mouth to taste it, the way you might taste a new candy. The vial broke. A small amount of whatever was inside got on her tongue and slipped past the mucous membrane.

"It's bitter," she said, and spat it into the sink.

Ray said something like "yeah, that's rough" and went back to watching the game.

The first change was small. Shelly started waking up at three in the morning and opening the refrigerator. Not to get food—just to open it. Stand in the cold light and stare at nothing for ten or fifteen minutes before closing it and going back to bed.

Then she started eating raw ham. Not cooked. Not prepared. Just slices from the deli, cold and greasy, eaten out of the wrapper while she watched daytime TV.

Ray noticed but said nothing. He'd seen people change after grief. His brother had started drinking heavily after his wife died. His sister had stopped cutting her hair. People changed. It was what you did.

By the second month, Shelly's body odor had changed. It wasn't bad exactly—just different. Heavier. Like the smell of wet earth after a rain, but underneath there was something else, something coppery and wrong.

Ray said, "Can you take a shower?" And she did. But the smell came back by evening.

He stopped asking.

Shelly stopped brushing her teeth. Her breath smelled like something that had been in a pocket. Ray started eating at the diner down the road instead of at home, just to avoid it. He told himself it was because the diner coffee was better. It wasn't.

He applied for jobs in Indiana. A factory there was hiring, they said, and the pay was better than Walmart, and the rent in Youngstown was too high for what he was making. He got the job. He started in November.

He didn't tell Shelly he was leaving. He just packed a bag, left the keys on the kitchen table, and drove north at four in the morning while she was still asleep.

He didn't look back. He'd learned that lesson in France, back when he was twenty-two and the rain wouldn't stop and the men around him kept dying and he learned that looking back doesn't help the dead and doesn't help the living. You just keep walking.

The apartment in Indiana was a single room above a hardware store. The mattress was thin and the walls were thin and the heating system made a clanking sound that never stopped. Ray slept through it. He was too tired to notice.

He wrote Shelly a letter one night in January. He sat at the small table in the corner of his room, with the clanking heater behind him and the sound of trucks backing up outside the window, and he wrote:

"Shelly, I don't know how you are. I don't know if that thing is still in your body or if it's gone or if it ever was anything real. I just want to tell you that I don't hate you. I'm just... tired."

He folded the letter and put it in an envelope. He wrote her address on it. And then he put it in his desk drawer and never mailed it.

He works at the factory now. He comes home at five in the evening, eats dinner in front of the TV, goes to bed at ten. The clanking heater keeps him awake sometimes. He counts the clanks until he falls asleep. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. He loses track around twelve.

Sometimes he thinks about calling her. Not to talk—just to hear her voice. But he doesn't. He's too tired.

The letter sits in the desk drawer. He opened it once, six months after he wrote it, just to read it again. It was the same words. Same sentence. Same ending.

"I don't hate you. I'm just tired."

He closed it and put it back.

That's the story. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody died. Nobody was saved. A man met a woman. They got married. Something went wrong with her body. He got tired. He left. She stayed.

That's all.

Nothing much happened.