Casey ventures into the realm Ancient Greek Science Fiction: Lucian's True Story (A.D. 170), the earliest known fiction about traveling in outer space, is followed by Casey's tale of how a minor Eleatic philosopher--a student of Leucippus--dis fell into the abyss of an infinitely small space.

"...When Diminus regained consciousness, he found himself in possession of an extraordinary power: he could now make infinitely small space out of any surface in the world, simply by tugging on it. The size of the surface mattered not: he could draw any city and its peoples nearer to him, and need not, as other mortals, himself traverse the space between..."

The Ancients and the Moderns duke it out in Hannah's two tales of rivalry between books, bugs, and hair stylists: Jonathan Swift's classic "The Battle of the Books" (1704) and Hannah's variation, "The Battle of the Bobs", set in the year 1964:

"...E.M. worships at the fashion altars of Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman, specifically between 1942-1949, and is morally incapable of creating a hairstyle antonymous to that time. S.P., meanwhile, worships the fashion of the moment. Her current obsession is Jackie Kennedy’s “mourning period” look..."

Casey tells two tales of love, infidelity and travel in Eastern Europe: "Journey" (1958) by the Polish writer Stanislaw Dygat, and her own summary of story she would call "The Diplomat's Wife":

"The Intern Q pretended to doze off again; he could not yet summon the energy necessary to mask his abiding terror of saying the wrong thing to the diplomat or the diplomat’s wife, of speaking too much or too little or in the wrong tone or so much in the right tone that he sounded insincere and thus, despite years of work and study and excellent marks, losing forever his chance of a post in the diplomatic service..."

Hannah explores magical realism with a reading from "In the Family" by Cuban writer Maria Elena Llana, and Hannah's own take on the genre, a non-existent story that would be titled "In the Cards:"

"Mrs. Cavallo arrives at the designated card table in an uncharacteristically opaque state, having died from unknown causes sometime since last Fridays game. With her, she brings an old deck of tarot cards and proposes a variation of their customary Scopa game to commemorate her long life, now ended...."