About the Author

Nick Almeida’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Southeast Review, Mid-American Review, American Literary Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston and holds an MFA from The Michener Center for Writers, where he edited Bat City Review. His chapbook, Masterplans, was selected by judge Steve Almond as grand prize winner of The Masters Review’s inaugural Chapbook Contest in Fiction and is available now.

The title story of this collection features numerous elements of what I came to think of as the Almeidan universe: a woman with a prosthetic hook for a hand, a waterbed rent by sexual hijinks, a deadly cottonmouth, a plane crash. But at its heart—and this is really key to the whole shebang—the author is writing about grief and trauma, how we survive what we live through.