One Person Away from You

Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 Moon City Short Fiction Award One Person Away From You is a collection of stories that oscillates between the fantastic and the familiar: for every woman who turns into a swan, there's a man who bungles a romantic relationship in Italy; for every sky that rains a torrent of laughter, there's a husband reminiscing about his honeymoon. Above all, the stories explore our common lot of lostness and longing, our question of whether our life and loves are the right ones or the product of some cosmic error. Whether it's a sea appearing suddenly in a bone dry valley, an angel musing on his relationship with a mortal woman, or a narrator yearning for an absent lover the deeply emotional stories search for meaning. Throughout this collection, characters and entire towns search through the constructs of identity, time, fairy tales, and love letters, to find the flicker of constancy in the sea of change that is human life.