A darkly comic piece about when the body goes awry.

"Daniel finds blood in his underwear on a Monday. It happens in the eighth floor men’s room, during a restructuring meeting. The meeting has something to do with 'capitalizing on human potential,' which is a phrase, after three hours of PowerPoint presentations, Daniel still does not understand. "

An ailing massage therapist views life and interpersonal connections with philosophical musings.

" Again my eyes get the waves, white water foam at the edges, rolling toward the center, blurring my vision. It feels like someone ripping off the film of my eye, Doc. Like someone's pulling the lid off my eye if my eye were a pudding. Cold plastic chair. A bright light. He looks disconcerted and leaves the room and is gone for awhile and then comes back in."

A classic short detailing a woman's grief.

" She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her."

Pleasure, pain, and electricity from the author of Daddy's (Featherproof Books). Explicit.

"After I cleaned myself up, I went to the fence. I went again just before Tim came home. He thought I was out there to greet him, and I let him believe it."

Musician Jordaan Mason's eerie, formally experimental story about a love triangle.

"The difference between him and her was parts of the body represented through skin as organs which were not the same organs. "

Raymond Carver's stories have a knack for illuminating uncomfortable marriage scenes, and this tale of a man wanting his wife to lose weight is as well-written as it is saddening.

"He pulled the covers up, closed his eyes, and allowed himself to think about the incident. The humiliation started in his face, the forehead and cheeks, and worked down into his shoulders and on into his stomach and legs."

Life without reflection.

"She does her hair in the morning in much the same way her husband shaves: by feel, brushing it out, patting it into shape, fixing it with pins. She's been putting on earrings for forty years, and certainly doesn't require a mirror for that."