“I have reason to believe my wife has a sleep disorder but is keeping it from me so I won’t worry.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The other day I happened to overhear her on the phone, lamenting to a friend that every morning she wakes up with a jerk.”

Jim Courter’s short stories have appeared in the United States, Canada, and England. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has won an Illinois Arts Council award for short fiction. His essays have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Smithsonian, and on the op-ed pages of the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal. His mystery novel, Rhymes with Fool, was published in 2018 by Peasantry Press. First Things First: Ephemera and Offscourings of a Distracted Writer, a collection of essays, humor, and short stories, was published in 2019.