Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.

Procrastination is something you do yourself. You know: "I gotta sharpen these pencils before I start. I got 20 pencils, they're looking kinda dull." Well, the pencils aren't calling you and alluring you and inviting you and offering you anything. They're just sitting there. You're the one who's procrastinating.

Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.

... But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.

He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. “Just watch me,” he said.

But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.

They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other