Rain moved in a few weeks after I submitted my winning lottery ticket, and the season turned into its chilly, dying self. The ground turned to mud, and a couple of back roads in the area flooded out. I was lucky I lived in a trailer—no basement to flood. But my place wasn’t completely spared. A support beam that held up a corner of my brief front porch—a five-by-five-foot slatted platform that connected the front steps to my screen door—collapsed one morning as I left the house, putting the whole thing at a crazed angle. The beam had been looking rather dark and moldy for a few months, so I wasn’t too surprised. But I couldn’t have cared less. I let the collapsed beam stay where it was.

By that time, strangers had started showing up at random times to knock on my door. I liked envisioning them tripping over the collapsed porch, striking their head on the debris below, and bleeding out in the mud. I still had that strange sense of forward motion, and fixing my old porch was one of a million little signifiers of the present that threatened it, and soon I avoided anything that required daily upkeep, or that sent the subtle message to my brain that I was remaining in this place.

As it turned out, the collapsed porch was a hit with the reporters. I guess it made their rags-to-riches stories all the more juicy, really adding to the white-trash flavoring that peppered most of their articles about me. I was glad my mother was dead. She would have been horrified.

I lived in a state that required the public disclosure of lottery winners’ names. That’s how word got out. Before, during, and after the reporters came to my door, every other stranger who wanted to congratulate or extort me in person kept coming.

The worst of these visitors were the old customers I remembered from the market. One afternoon Mr. Spitz himself drove by in his pickup, leaned out the window, and hollered either a congratulations or a fuck-you. It was hard to tell, knowing Spitz. He had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and was being an asshole, so not much had changed in his life. But I noticed he looked more gray and faded than I remembered. His truck looked older, too. It gave me a shiver.

When these people showed up I hated it, turned off the lights, tried to make it look like nobody was home. Their existence rattled my sense of time, the surety of my plans. I didn’t like knowing they were alive. Inside every person’s head is a set of films, each a spool of memories, and one of these reels features the most trivial things a person does over the course of a lifetime, including ordering a ham sandwich from the local market’s deli counter years ago and the girl who handed it to you, and I hated that the films in these other people’s brains were still running, and that I was in them. The humiliation of being alive, and being seen! Oh, it wrangled me. I wanted to kill the very fact. I had known these strangers only briefly, and only by which brand of chaw they preferred, or what cut of meat to set aside, but they threatened to fan the dying ember of the past into a full, hemorrhoidal flame again, just when I was about to leave it behind forever. But there wasn’t much I could do to stop it. News of my winnings made the national outlets; my front porch and I sagged in the rain across fifty states.