Paul Rankin’s account of a father-son camping trip and an exchange with an inscrutable stranger reads like it was plucked from an anthology of Southern gothic tales. It’s a tense, slightly spooky meditation on how private faith can grow wild and unruly, how isolation breeds suspicion, and how readily we project our fears.

The more I affirmed my faith, the more suspicious the man became, as if he hadn’t come to share the good news but to catch us in a damnable lie. As the interrogation persisted, I couldn’t help thinking of how Flannery O’Connor once described the South as a Christ-haunted place. I love Jesus, but, good Lord, his ostensible followers can be irksome and even sinister at times. Clearly unconvinced by my profession of faith but out of ideas—or maybe just weary with the effort—the stranger finally walked the three steps back to his camp site.

For lack of a better idea, I relit the stove and was adjusting the flame when the man returned, holding one hand behind his back.

With a flourish he brought out a cross fashioned of two sticks and thin binding wire. This he presented to Fish, then added that he’d have a big surprise waiting in the morning. With that, he turned and walked away, into the woods and out of sight.

Not long after the death of his father, Derek Askey, a new father himself, is selected as an alternate juror for a murder trial. The experience upends the typical vulnerability and openness of his life: Askey, under court order, cannot speak with his wife about the random violence heaped upon him, yet nevertheless worries about what his infant son “received from me” during his wordless days in the courtroom. He must withstand the gruesome details of the criminal trial, yet will not be allowed to participate in the jury’s deliberations. His personal essay is a challenging exploration of enforced silence, and the ways in which we seek to unburden ourselves through voice.

Before the trial, the other would-be jurors and I were asked our names, our occupations, whether we had spouses or children, and whether we could be impartial regarding the case, in which a man was being accused of murdering his girlfriend. At first I was curious to hear other people’s answers—Oh, wow, that guy fixes airplanes?—but curiosity quickly gave way to numb shock at how many people’s lives had been touched by domestic violence or murder. Or both. People you see every day. People who fix airplanes. One man said that, when he was little, his dad had beaten his mother; if he was being honest, he didn’t think he could be unbiased. The man was dismissed, and a woman was called up from the uncomfortable wooden pews to face the same interrogation. She had been attacked herself, she said. Some women had sisters, sisters-in-law, or best friends who’d been hit by a spouse or boyfriend.