One month before his college graduation, Paul Rousseau is accidentally shot in the head by his roommate and best friend.

At some point in the course of Paul and Mark’s friendship, Mark acquired—legally and with required permits—five firearms. Those weapons lived with them in their college apartment. It was a non-issue for the two best friends. They were inseparable. They were twenty-two-year-old boys at the height of their college experience, unaware that everything was about to change forever.

The bullet ripped through two walls before it struck Paul’s skull. Mark had accidentally pulled the trigger while in the other room and—frightened for his own future—delayed getting treatment for Paul, who miraculously remained conscious the entire time. In vivid detail, Friendly Fire brings us into the world of both the shooting itself and its surgical counterpoint—the dark spaces of survival in the face of a traumatic brain injury and into the paranoid, isolating, dehumanizing maw of personal injury cases.

Friendly Fire is the story of a friendship—both its formation and its destruction. Through phenomenal writing and gripping detail, Paul reveals a compelling and inspirational story that speaks to much of contemporary American life.

Paul Rousseau is a disabled writer with work in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Catapult, and elsewhere. You can find more of his work online at Paul-Rousseau.com.

Salvatore Pane was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He is the author of two novels, Last Call in the City of Bridges and The Theory of Almost Everything, in addition to a nonfiction book about video games, Mega Man 3, published by Boss Fight Books. He is currently co-writing a textbook about writing video games for Bloomsbury with Julialicia Case and Eric Freeze. He was awarded the 2022 Autumn House Fiction Prize, and his winning short story collection, The Neorealist in Winter: Stories, is forthcoming in October 2023.

He is the writer/narrative designer of RetroMania Wrestling on Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox and has written and designed many other video games. He served as a Freelance Localization Editor for NIS America on Trails to Azure and earned his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. Currently, he’s an Associate Professor at the University of St. Thomas where he teaches creative writing, video games, and Italian film. He lives with his wife and Martin Scorsese the Cat in St. Paul and can be reached via Twitter.

His short fiction has been nominated or shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web, Best of the Net, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 [Very] Short Fictions. He won the Turow-Kinder Award in Fiction judged by Stewart O’ Nan, and his work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Story Magazine, American Short Fiction, Paste, Kotaku, BOMB, The Rumpus, The American Book Review, and many other venues. He is the co-creator of the graphic novel, The Black List, and co-hosted The Jabsteps, a podcast about the NBA. His video games have been exhibited at WordPlay and BAR SK, and he has presented his work in Italy, Iceland, and elsewhere internationally.

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