Free online fiction. I've been getting published since 1969, and in all that time, I've been given three stories, ones that just came to me, from the Story Place, whole and unbidden. "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" is one of them. I was at a friend's house, sleeping on a couch. I got up to put on some coffee (they were all upstairs doing Fun Stuff) and as I passed the stereo I turned it on. The song was Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Before I got the water in the pot, "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" came to me—nearly all of it, just like that. By the time everybody came down about noon, I was finishing the first draft. That was 1974. I was thankful. If writing were always that easy, anybody could do it. "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" originally appeared in Orbit 18, edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row, 1976).