It was 4:20am. The alarm sounded or I wouldn’t have woken up for another four hours. The sound of rain hit me next. Rain. Rain on the day I was supposed to hike up to…

Take a breath. Calm down. Okay. Writers should only use exclamation points when they literally want to shout what they’re saying. I rarely shout when when I’m talking like this, so I rarely use exclamation…

There’s a woman vomiting upstairs. She did it once, and I didn’t pay attention. She did it again, and – like when someone sneezes twice in a row – I noticed. When she continued, though,…