Mercy is a word we think we understand until life puts us in a room where we have to actually practice it. JW explores what Jesus, the Stoics, Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, and Twain had to say about mercy, then tells the story of a hospital room, a dying woman, and what happens when mercy gets corrupted into self-protection and called something else. The second labor of growth starts here.

In Duwali Bottoms, a bloody nosed Tony Haines finds his way back to his papaw and an old man who knows that sometimes the most merciful thing you can do is let the big ones go.