A collection of short stories that form a story cycle of Gulf Coast residents and expatriates engaged in the struggle to maintain a cultural identity in a realm of change. For the author, one of the advantages of "being southern" is luxuriating in complex ambiguity, time shifting at will, nonlinear thought, love of the absurd (which it often seems to be the way of life), nostalgia, and an opposition to manufactured realms of reality found in modernist fiction. This collection is southern, an organic unit, a piece of string. The first story is one end and the last is the other. The bits in the middle reflect the ends and all things are related.