A collection of short stories about the unexplained, the unusual and the unexpected.
I have a very active brain and constantly come up with "what if," "wouldn't it be cool if," and "I wonder what would happen if..." thoughts. Some tend to mix into other thoughts and give some weird ass anomaly of a story.
A woman comes north to empty her dead mother's hoarder house, expecting a month of sacks and a skip. On the fourth day she reaches for the wall of newspapers that has stood in the front room since 1991 and her arm goes into it up to the wrist. What's underneath is cold, translucent, and sweating a fluid that smells of her mother's perfume and the back of a hot television. It doesn't fight when she cuts it. It takes something else instead, and she only notices what's missing when her sister mentions a summer she can no longer find.
A couple visits a fertility clinic where prospective parents interview personality simulations of their viable embryos before making a selection. The process is polished, the staff are professional, and the first six sessions are stranger and more affecting than either of them expected. The seventh is different.
A municipal data analyst notices that a city's predictive welfare system has written off an entire apartment building during a lethal heat wave. What she does to fix it sets off a cascade she didn't anticipate — and raises a question she can't stop thinking about: what happens to people whose lives are too quiet for an algorithm to see.