Known to Me Personally: Twelve Stories of Moral Character Revelation

Twelve stories, twelve people asked for the truth at the moment it costs the most.In Nebraska, a scale man has skimmed two percent off every truck for twenty years, and the one person he wants to spare is the widow his machine just shorted. Off Cameron, a cook on a shrimp boat watches a man go over the rail, and she must decide which of two true stories the record will carry. A crane operator in Baton Rouge reads a load chart into the record knowing what it costs her. A skip tracer in Kern County reads porches for a living and sells a client the wrong address on purpose. In Mathews County, a woman who has run for twelve years under borrowed names stands on a bank while a boy goes through the ice. And in Grant, at a card table at the end of a thirty-two-year practice, a notary finally answers for the dead.Each story lends a person to the next. The counties are real places. The documents are invented. The witnesses are known to the reader personally.Known to Me Personally is a linked collection about the space between what happened and what stands in the record, and about the question the law never requires: is this what you want?