A tornado rips the roof from a strip mall. A girl is scorched by her own reflection. A daughter enacts revenge for her mother’s grotesquely inappropriate remarks. An unwell man prepares to leave his home and community for the last time. A woman contemplates her impending transformation into a sea creature, while another, gifted with second sight, finds that ghosts start to outnumber the living. With plots that hinge on moments of unease, betrayal, or violence, these small stories turn on becoming and unforeseen departures. Ranging from North America to Aotearoa New Zealand, they move through the captured time of childhood memory to the vastness of geological time as experienced by an escaping moon, and often, they lean into a queer and ecologically inflected Gothic. (Fiction)