Maintenance Log, Miyauchi Heights
A superintendent's maintenance log begins with routine entries, but each contains one wrong detail. The impossible accumulates in professional language until he opens an apartment and finds what his estranged daughter tried to tell him four years ago.
Overgrown Inventories
A woman discovers she can grow plants on any surface — drywall, asphalt, her own skin. Three voices tell the story: her meticulous inventories, her sister's phone calls about rent and landlords, and a clinical field guide cataloguing a new species.
Every Child Lighter
A family whose children are each born with a single impossible trait — told backward from the youngest grandchild to the original transgression in the forest. Each section reveals the cause of what came after.
Sazón
A woman returns to her dead grandmother's town to sell the house and finds the kitchen still cooking, the recipes a chronicle of the family's history, and the last entry unfinished — waiting for her.
Correspondences Without Metaphor
A cataloguer who has spent three years navigating an archive whose corridors change length daily finds her bodily map disrupted when a coworker asks her to lunch — and the building begins accommodating two.
Borrowed Ground
On Kenya's independence day, 1963, the calcified dead of a soda lake walk out to watch the village ceremony. A surviving forest fighter must decide whether to name the man who betrayed them, or let the dead's silent presence deliver its own verdict.
Index of Remaining Things
A copy editor discovers the manuscript she is proofreading keeps losing passages overnight. Her marginal notes become the only record of what the book — and the world — used to contain.
Overnight Revisions
A woman works overnight revisions at an institution that keeps changing — hallways, policies, colleagues. She is the best at adapting. She has never asked why adaptation is necessary.
Two Kitchens
A cook in a South Delhi household discovers her spices carry different emotions depending on who eats — the same dal tastes of contentment to her employer and grief to herself. As her power grows conscious, she faces a choice the story refuses to resolve.
Less Itself
A konbini worker who has inventoried the same shelves for eleven years notices the flavors of products dimming. No one else cares. When she finds her dead grandmother's desiccated fermentation crock, she begins something she cannot measure and may not finish.
Bulk Rate
An HVAC technician in Scranton receives an administrative letter terminating his godhood for insufficient worship metrics. He has no memory of being divine. To complete the termination, he must collect signed forms from five former believers.
The Crying of Saints
Three sisters in a decaying Colombian house discover their grandmother's fertility ritual works — but the children don't age, speak dead languages, and remember futures yet to come. As the house grows impossible, the sisters must decide: break the spell or surrender to it.
Santo and Season
Every year on the feast of San Emigdio, a ridiculous patron saint of earthquakes, something is taken from Dolores Vidal's family. Three iterations of the same season — young, middle-aged, old — told out of order, as the house remembers them.
Subsidence and Survey
A hydrological engineer returns to her childhood home in Kerala, which has been sinking one centimeter per month since her parents' inter-caste marriage. Her father sits dead in a chair with his hair still growing, and a developer wants to buy the land her mother secretly arranged to erase.
Mouth Full of Rivers
In 1990s Lagos, a woman inherits her grandmother's compound and the spirit-child who has died and returned for three generations. When the child speaks in the grandmother's voice, the neighborhood women must decide what to feed a hunger that belongs to the living and the dead alike.
Paloma and the Singing Fig
Paloma Resendiz, 26, lives alone in a house held upright by a fig tree that digests the dead. The figs taste of her ancestors. The walls sing recipes in their voices. She has never eaten food that wasn't made from her own family's grief and joy.
Catalog of Borrowed Days
A man whose wife left without explanation discovers the third floor of a Setagaya library contains doors instead of books. Each opens onto a single ordinary day from a stranger's life. He searches for the hinge — the day she decided to leave. The library has no such room.
Henna and Static
A QA tester in Bangalore's Electronic City begins receiving phantom smells of tamarind and sounds of water in dry pipes — the sensory archive of her dead grandmother's clairvoyance and her estranged mother's lie-detection, transmitted through the ruins of their demolished village.