West Heart Kill

by Dann McDorman

Ralph felt that this map, his secret map, was in fact the true map of West Heart.

This entire scene was not in my original manuscript. At some point during rewrites, my editor at Knopf, Jennifer Barth (who’s absolutely amazing), proposed that we needed one more scene near the end, before some of the novel’s really crazy stuff starts to go down. I immediately thought of Ralph, who is one of my favorite characters in the book. His role is limited but important; I decided to give him a new map and one more crack at solving the word problems from Thursday night. (The “NO LIMIT” answer to problem #3 was inspired by Bob Dylan’s song “Love Minus Zero / No Limit.” At a concert once, Dylan said “The name of this song is a fraction… I made the title before I made the song.”)