Florida

This short story collection contains eleven stories set largely in Florida, linked by the state's landscape and a recurring unnamed narrator. The stories explore motherhood, isolation, environmental anxiety, domestic tension, and survival, often against a backdrop of natural menace.

In "Ghosts and Empties," an unnamed mother of two boys walks her north-central Florida neighborhood at night to escape the rage building inside her. She leaves bedtime duties to her calm husband while she observes neighbors through lit windows, watches a pair of black swans lose all their cygnets, and tracks recurring figures: a woman with a Great Dane who grows visibly sicker, an overweight boy on a treadmill who transforms into a slender young man. She reveals that just before Christmas she found a sexual conversation and an explicit image on her husband's computer and walked until dawn without confronting him. By spring, a homeless tent city in the pines has been burned in a controlled fire, and fences have gone up around Bo Diddley Plaza; she rages at the coordinated displacement. The story closes with her meditation on her sons' future and the indifferent moon.

"At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" traces the life of Jude, born in a Cracker-style house, a traditional Florida pioneer dwelling, at the edge of a swamp. His father, a university herpetologist, fills the house with snakes. His unhappy Northern mother flees with Jude to the coast during World War II, opens a bookstore, and thrives, but Jude's father returns from the war and forces them back. When the mother tries to escape by train, the father holds Jude back as she boards alone. Jude grows up isolated and never opens a letter his mother sends through his uncle. His father dies alone from a snakebite. After a reckless period in Boston following his mother's death, Jude is hit by a bread truck. A homely antiques dealer stays at his bedside, and he marries her. They return to his father's Florida property, where Jude sells land to the encroaching university and grows wealthy. In old age, left alone when his wife and daughter travel to Boston, he rows onto the lake and loses his oars. Stranded, he hallucinates his father and confronts his own cautious life. The wind pushes him to shore, where his wife, returned early, reaches for him, and he breathes in her love, knowing he has "escaped the hungry dark once more" (46).

"Dogs Go Wolf" follows two sisters, ages seven and four, abandoned on a small Florida island after their reckless mother disappeared on a boat with her boyfriend. Two strangers left to watch the girls fled when alarming news came over the radio, leaving the children with dwindling supplies. The girls boil pond water and tell each other fairy tales to survive. A man arrives by boat and calls out, claiming their mother is with him, but the older sister senses danger and they hide. The narrative leaps forward: the older sister will become a lawyer; the younger will marry a controlling man. Back on the island, they hear music from a far beach, don their mother's dresses, and step onto the sand, where a sunbathing woman raises her arms. The girls take the gesture for a welcome and run.

In "The Midnight Zone," a mother sustains a concussion at a remote hunting camp after her husband leaves to handle an emergency. Her young sons tend her wound while she struggles to remember their names. They keep her awake through the night by describing the ocean's zones, including the midnight zone, where fish are blind. She experiences a dissociative episode, feeling her consciousness leave her body. When her husband finally arrives hours late, she reads vast, elemental fear in his face.

"Eyewall" presents a woman riding out a hurricane alone in her old Florida house. Three ghosts visit: her late husband, a poet who left her for a younger woman and died of a heart attack in the woman's bed; her college boyfriend, who died by suicide; and her father, who died of cancer while she was at summer camp, his illness kept secret from her. She recalls falling in love with the house for the swing in the oak, a promise of children she never had. At dawn, the house is devastated but standing, and on the front step she finds a single intact egg.

"For the God of Love, for the Love of God" follows two couples and a child at a stone house in French wine country. Amanda and her partner Grant vacation with Amanda's wealthy friend Genevieve, Genevieve's husband Manfred, who has bipolar disorder, and their four-year-old son Leo. Amanda's niece Mina, whom Amanda raised, arrives to nanny Leo. Mina is a stunning Black 21-year-old, and Genevieve's startled reaction reveals her racial assumptions. Tensions multiply: Manfred's mania has bankrupted the family, Grant secretly plans to leave Amanda for law school, Grant has kissed Mina and she punched him, and Manfred has stopped taking his medication. The story ends from Mina's perspective as she decides to stay in France, seeing the adults as people teetering on a precipice.

In "Salvador," Helena, who spends each year caring for her chronically ill mother in Miami, takes her annual month of freedom in Salvador, Brazil. She clashes silently with a shopkeeper who leers at her and speaks harshly to a girl in his back room. A massive storm traps Helena, and the shopkeeper pulls her into his flooded store. They sit in darkness for hours. When he falls asleep, she escapes into a dazzling morning of churchbells. Watching him kneel in his ruined store, she hates her impulse to comfort but cannot resist it, picking things up and piling them in his arms.

"Flower Hunters" returns to the recurring narrator on Halloween night. Absorbed in William Bartram, the 18th-century Quaker naturalist who traveled through Florida, and reeling from her best friend Meg's request for a break from their friendship, she sits alone cataloging her fears: climate change, a sinkhole forming near her house, her children's mortality. She inspects the sinkhole in the rain, then picks up the phone to call her husband, letting her hunger for his voice grow.

"Above and Below" follows a failed academic who loses her funding, her apartment, and her boyfriend, descending into homelessness. She lives in her station wagon, cleans nightclubs with a loquacious man named Eugene, and eventually shelters in a tent city, watching children for a woman named Jane who is then arrested. She turns the children over to social services and finds her way to a communal squat on the prairie. The narrative leaps forward to the difficult birth of her daughter years later, where the old panic returns before giving way to release.

"Snake Stories" weaves the recurring narrator's reflections on snakes with her discovery of a battered girl in an alley who has already been assaulted. The girl refuses police and an ambulance but accepts the narrator's help cleaning up and a ride to a small green cabin. When the narrator returns with an officer, the cabin appears abandoned. The story also surfaces a past boyfriend who forced himself on the narrator. She asks her husband if good people still exist; he says billions, but the bad ones make more noise.

The final story, "Yport," follows the recurring narrator as she takes her two sons to Normandy for August, ostensibly to research Guy de Maupassant but truly to escape an unshakable dread. In the cold fishing village of Yport she drinks too much, cannot write, and realizes she finds Maupassant morally repugnant. While checking email outside a church, she learns a close friend has killed himself. The dread she fled has found her. The story closes with a defining image: she crouches beside her younger son in a tide pool while her older son walks far across the rocks. The little boy holds a rock over a snail and whispers, "Boom" (278), but keeps his arm raised and his fingers closed.