This story is a retelling of something that happened to me when I was seven years old.

I was lying alone in my room when I heard the voice, deep and crackly, coming from beneath my bed.

I used to bartend at this hole-in-the-wall dive bar down in south Boston back in the mid-2000s—the kind of rusty, run-down…

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to…