"I placed my hand in the shoe, and stuck my finger through the hole. But it didn’t emerge from the shoe.... After six tries, I realized the problem: my forefinger had entered another dimension."

"It was last spring, early, when I fell in love with the ferret woman. The first beautiful day, exquisite whirlybird of a sunny blue day, and I’m in the park, lying on the lawn."

"Stuva Grundlig stood on a bluff overlooking the sea. This was a sign, this winking moon. Tomorrow they would go."

The need for quality may call for heroic measures. What would you do if your home couldn't weather the rain?

"The interior of the Goldmine Casino was a realm all its own, row after row of slot machines bracing the floor, a steady current of beeps and buzzes, flashing lights...."

"Following a Newtonian law of incarceration, the court officer clamped the cuffs on him with a force equal to his show of resistance...."

Two men meet in a jail cell... circumstance juxtaposed. What exactly is this thing called "chance" that separates one person's fate from another?

"On the border between Millbrook and Pleasant Valley, just off Route 44, there’s a little patch of woods where my boyfriend hanged himself."

A visitor from the other side... real or hallucination? Should you heed their message? Yes or no, it's already written in the script.

"Three horses cantered across the plain: a grey Arabian, a Palomino and a Roan. Their riders wore spacesuits... but this was not the moon."

"Giovambattista put his foot down on the accelerator as he left the crowded streets of Paris and headed southwest towards Versailles..."

Why is an 18th-century doctor driving a Jaguar? A deeper question: where is that space in which we meet those who are long dead?