It’s one of many Saturday nights in 1970 when I’m fifteen years old. I live in the very small town of Sumner, Illinois, with a population of around a thousand. We have no teen center. I don’t belong to a church that sponsors youth activities, and the Friday night sock hop after the basketball game has come and gone. I’m not old enough to drive, so my friends and I hit the streets, just to see what we might find. If it’s trouble, so be it. We’re bored, and we’re ready.

Our hub is Perrott’s Grocery, a small family-owned market on Cedar Street, just a block south of where I live on Locust. My friends and I stop for bottles of pop and snacks like Funyuns and Suzy Q’s, and yes, I can admit it now, we often end up shoplifting whatever catches our eyes—Pall Mall Gold cigarettes, Swisher Sweets cigarillos, King Edward crimp cut smoking tobacco, Top rolling papers. We’re in a hurry to sample what’s forbidden. We’re eager to grow up.

Some nights, we head down Cary Street where a girl I like lives. If we’re lucky, we get invited inside. If I’m lucky, I manage some alone time with this girl who sits next to me on the couch and lays her head on my shoulder and gives me what she calls butterfly kisses. Here eyelashes brush across my neck. If she’s not home, or if her mother thinks we’re spending too much time together, my friends and I keep moving. Maybe we walk out into the country to the old Hadley School, a one-room frame building about a mile west of town. Why do we go there? No reason except it’s somewhere different.

We have other places we frequent: a kid’s playhouse behind a home where no one lives, an abandoned outbuilding next to an uptown upholstery shop, a gravity wagon in a corn field at the edge of town, anywhere we can pretend we’re older than we are and we don’t have lives that sometimes make us sad. We haven’t yet admitted that this is part of the deal when you’re fifteen and you live in a small town that presses into us with no escape in sight. Where would we go? To the years unrolling before us? To work the oil fields or the factories or the farms? We haven’t recognized our options, or the lack thereof. We try so hard to break free, if only for a few moments on a Saturday night, from the futures that wait for us even while we long for time to speed up.

We end up places where we have no business being. The upholstery shop where the drunken owner gives us beers, teaches us card tricks, and lowers his trousers to show us the scarred skin on his thighs from where he was burned in a fire. The pool hall after hours where we join a group of men to watch a stag film. The backseat of a Ford Fairlane with a man, soon-to-be sentenced to prison, who insists that someone is going to give him a blowjob; fortunately, no one does, and we stumble back to our safer lives, a bit shaken but none the worse for wear.

One night we meet the local Peeping Tom coming toward us down the sidewalk. He’s an old bowlegged man who wears a white cowboy hat and pointy-toed boots. We ask him where he’s going. He says he’s going home. We chuckle, pretty sure he’s really on his way to look in someone’s window. “Boys,” he says in a soft, earnest voice, “at night I like to read my Bible.”

And then there’s the retired schoolteacher who lives alone and sometimes takes nighttime walks. And the owner of Perrott’s grocery, a widow doing her best to get by, and the little boy who imitates sirens while he waits to become a grown serial killer (no joke). All manner of people who live outside whatever circle of light happens to fall on our little town. The Irish writer, Frank O’Connor, in his study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, says the form is particularly well-suited for tales of what he calls “submerged populations,” by which he means people left on the fringes of society. I’ve spent my life writing about characters like the retired schoolteacher, the boy who would become a murderer, the widow market owner, the Peeping Tom, the criminal, the upholstery shop owner, the boy I was when I was fifteen, and girls like the one on Cary Street who offered me tenderness when I needed to have faith that all of the hurt and the forgotten deserved to be understood. These are the people I know most intimately. Once I acknowledged that, my work took on a depth of purpose it previously lacked.

And so I ask you. Are you listening to the lonely voices? If you’re a writer, who is your submerged population? Who matters to you? How are you providing them with a way to be heard?