In his first collection of short fiction, poet R.T. Smith explores the lives of farm boys, estranged husbands, widows, and beleaguered shift workers whose private rituals cannot quite protect them as the evolving New South abandons its agrarian past. The intervening sketches provide the episodic autobiography of a young boy, who learns the art of storytelling by assigning words to the images from the drive-in theater across the road. The result is an album of small-town life in the Bible Belt since the Second World War.