Venture to a place where reality bends: where a dying butterfly may inspire a revelation, where after being electrocuted, an artist's body becomes a work of art, where a man may wake up after falling four stories to find himself face to face with his ten-year-old self. This outright defiance of that which we hold to be impossible is rooted to varying degrees in each story, not simply because fiction allows it, but because it is within the geography of the imagination that the lost souls of this collection attain transcendence and emotional reconciliation.

It's 1978, the year after Elvis Presley died, and Kepler Pressler is a sixteen-year-old Toronto kid with an obsessive attachment to his sock monkey, a tendency to burst into tears, a mother with a nail fetish and a fondness for Shakespeare, and a father who says he works for the Space Agency and disappears a lot. Is dad dead? And what exactly happened on Kepler's 16th birthday? He is devoting a year to figuring it out in a mental health institute.