Erratics

…there it was. A boulder as big as a Buick…I worked myself up, said the rock didn’t belong in our neck of the woods, that it came from Canada. I told them to think how it was stuck for maybe a hundred thousand years inside some glacier before it fell free, only to find itself a thousand miles from home. ‘Maybe we should take it back,’ I said. Like the Ice-age erratic discovered by this teacher, the characters in these twelve stories are in the wrong place, either physically or emotionally. Buried in the wrong grave, born at the wrong time, stuck working the wrong job, or caught on the wrong side of the state line, these northern Ohio residents communicate with animals, have sex in storerooms, believe in the magic of divining rods, see visions through prison fences, and worry that life’s numbers don’t add up. Their stories are the soft drip of icicles, the flap of wings, the thump, thump of hearts, the sounds we make when trying to find our way home.