This child, round and cooing with hands clenched, was orphaned in a car accident. The woman who holds her now is not a mother; she never wanted to take care of a child, and would spend lonely years trying to forget this afternoon, trying to replace the raw images with nostalgic dreams of the child’s wet eyes and muffled cries. This is a child of the back roads. In his novella Fragments from the Backroad Michael Pifer explores one life-changing event through the mundane, everyday tasks of the town locals. Pifer takes these fragmented stories and skillfully weaves them together to create a story that keeps readers wondering how the lives of these people come together.