"The boy through the window"
"I had never known anybody that died, but I thought what you did was cry. Instead, I watched the boy across the street do one normal thing after another, folding clothes, reading books, playing video games."
The father who lived in the house across from my parents' house died one winter. I didn't live there anymore, but I could remember meeting the boy, and I felt sorry to hear what had happened.
I don't know that this is what inspired the story though so much as a five hour train ride from Montreal back to Toronto, and the first line, about burying bodies in the wintertime.
Read the full story here.