The stories in this collection examine the ways we use imagination to set aside human anguish and move on with our lives. Here baseball opens a passageway to life after death, obsession transforms romantic complexities into a corrupted form of happiness, conquest and empire begets guilt and a healing sacrifice, and the recipients of medical technology deal with the well-meant horrors inflicted on them. In Collateral Damage, the collection's centerpiece, writer John Fromme suffers a mental upset caused by his refusal to confront a family murder he witnessed as a child. Quirky, richly imagined characters populate these stories, inviting readers to measure them against their own lives and to want to read these stories again and again.