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* Sixteen-year-old Ned Scoletti is travelling north on a Greyhound bus from Fort Pierce, Florida to Spaulding, Massachusetts, to visit Aunt Josie. Problem is, his mother’s identical twin sister died when Nick was just a toddler. Or did she? * Jesse Caldwell, an auto mechanic, is painfully shy, lives at home and hates his moronic life. Miranda Huffington suffers from a gimpy leg and equally stunted personality. This is not your standard Harlequin romance. * Bartholomew Schroeder, a recent widower and retired plumber, can sweat pipes and fix broken toilets, but, on a weekend excursion to Martha's Vineyard, can he mend a teenage girl's broken spirit? * Maria Santos, who just bought the Breakfast Nook, knows nothing about cross-contamination, pest control, immersion gauges or reduced-oxygen packaging. The new health inspector is every restaurant owner’s worse nightmare, but Maria needn’t worry. She’s got an ace up her culinary sleeve. These are just a few of the situations you will find in this collection of bittersweet short stories, where the characters struggle to manage their lives in a user-unfriendly universe ...

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* Lenny slept with Elsie McGivney, a woman so dim-witted she can't make change or hold down an entry-level job. Lenny bedded the chucklehead but got no sex in the bargain. So why is he going back for more? * Bethany Glaspell approached the first-ever meeting with Great-uncle Vern, a man who returned from the jungles of Vietnam with a Hmong bride and warped personality, much as a cat burglar might plan his next heist, telling no one, neither friend nor family, her intentions. * There are five levels of gifted intelligence ranging from bright to profoundly gifted. One in every thirty thousand is 'exceptional', which makes Curtis Stedman, the part-time dishwasher at Nagel’s Bagels, one smart cookie! * Tawana Saunders is writing the great American novel. Problem is, six months into the project, she’s only got a rough draft plus three lousy paragraphs. These are just a few of the situations you will find in this collection of bittersweet short stories, where the characters struggle to manage their lives in a user-unfriendly universe. ...

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* A young boy spends a magical weekend with his sister, a former collegiate track star crippled in a freak accident. During the visit he learns a poignant lesson about the resilience of monarch butterflies and the human heart * Mrs. Chowdhary named her youngest daughter after Saint Theresa, the Little Flower of Jesus. Unfortunately, Terry has more in common with Attila the Hun than her nineteenth century namesake. * Marcie Callahan’s parents run around the house in their underwear. They belch and fart and do all sorts of gross and disgusting things. The Callahan clan doesn't have a stitch of class, culture, brains or social graces, which is why Marcie is ready for a change. * Dick wants fun. He has no dog. He has no cat. No Spot. No Puff. But he has a plan. See Dick board the plane. See Dick fly away. Far, far away. Hello happiness! Goodbye Jane These are just a few of the situations you will find in this collection of bittersweet short stories, where the characters struggle to manage their lives in a user-unfriendly universe. ...

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* Grace Paulson’s train wreck of a personal life takes a turn for the better when the elementary school teacher meets a gifted artisan whose handmade jewelry boxes are featured at the local museum. Well-versed in nineteenth century Russian literature, Carl Solomon also happens to be the school janitor. * Following his divorce, Dr. Stanley Gilford, chief of cardiology at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, restructured his life on the guiding principle of maximum gain, minimum pain. So what is the well-heeled doctor doing with Ruby, a high school dropout and waitress at the local greasy spoon, and what are his options visa vie the pallid, five year old boy whose damaged heart beats in three-four time? * A year out of high school, Clarissa, who couldn't even score a date for the senior prom, is into tantric sex, Pablo Neruda and orgasms bordering on divine rapture. And she's still a virgin! * While studing to become a rabbi at a yeshivah in Jersusalem, Peter Ostrowski witnesses a senseless act of violence that causes him to abandon the religious life. When he stumbles across the writings of Leo Pinsker, an equally disaffected seventeent...

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 Pearl Singleton, a forest ranger at the Pemberton Wildlife Preserve, is going to show eighteen year old Shawn Mariano her Osborne Smoke Finder, all six varieties of New England ferns, a beaver dam, and something he never bargained for.  A straight-laced ex-nun must decide what to do with a stolen Sony Trinitron TV. The arrival of a Russian Jew in the apartment complex where she lives resolves the matter of the ’hot’ TV while opening another can of existential worms.  When Ronda Wickford, the assistant manager of Brandenburg’s ShopRite Supermarket, inadvertently hires a middle-age man with a PhD in philosophy to run the fresh produce department, weird things begin to happen. As events unfold, she learns a thing or two about Wittgenstein’s linguistic theories, common decency and how to fix a leaky faucet.  Marie Augustin, an Haitian nurses aide, is blindsided when one of her elderly clients asks her to accompany him on a trip to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform in Tanglewood. Does the green-card immigrant, who witnessed first hand the endemic violence in her native country, follow agency protocol or bend rules to acc...

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Seventeen year-old Laurel Evers is running off to a fictional village in rural Maine in search of an idyllic existence that hasn’t existed since the era of the horse and buggy. Life was simpler, idyllic then. People meandered about in horse-drawn wagons, fished, grew their own potato crops and made throat lozenges from locally-grown spearmint boiled in metal cauldrons over the stove. Women braided floor mats from swamp-grown rushes, and even fashioned sandals from those very same pliable plants. The Civil War was a recent memory not some moldy, historical trivia and neighbors were more 'civil' or at least it seemed that way. ...

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Misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance – Jason Flanagan needs to make restitution for a crime committed fifteen years earlier. Problem is, the moral indiscretion isn’t punishable in any court of law....

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Twenty-eight year-old Jesse Caldwell is painfully shy, lives at home and hates his moronic life. Miranda Huffington suffers from a gimpy leg and equally stunted personality. This is not your standard Harlequin romance....

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Marie Augustin, an Haitian nurses aide, is blindsided when one of her elderly clients, Peter Marsoubian, asks her to accompany him on a trip to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform in Tanglewood. Does the green-card immigrant, who witnessed first hand the endemic violence in her native country, follow agency protocol or bend rules to accommodate the absurd whim of a dying man?...

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Gabe and Marie share a mutual disgust for the light-skinned Negro who never cleans up after her Great Dane at the Oak Knoll bird Sanctuary. For the lonely widower and lesbian thespian, their meeting is a textbook case of Jungian synchronicity, a serendipitous wink from the cosmos. ...

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Sylvia Mandelstam boasts what a wonderful time she had at the international literary symposium in Moscow. Truth be told, the trip was an unmitigated fiasco not unlike her marriage and personal life. She can lie shamelessly and dissemble to everyone - even Danny O'Rourke, the unassuming mason who arrives one summery day to repair her damaged brick wall. But not indefinitely....

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Jerome Spellman, the simple schizophrenic in Grace’s eleventh grade class, acts like an extra in a B-rated horror flick - Night of the Living Dead. Grace prays for a miracle, while Dr. Rosen, the school psychologist counsels, “Think positive but plan for the worse.”...

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Jerome Spellman, the simple schizophrenic in Grace’s eleventh grade class, acts like an extra in a B-rated horror flick - Night of the Living Dead. Grace prays for a miracle, while Dr. Rosen, the school psychologist counsels, “Think positive but plan for the worse.”...

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Pearl Singleton, a forest ranger at the Pemberton Wildlife Preserve, is going to show eighteen year old Shawn Mariano her Osborne Smoke Finder, all six varieties of New England ferns, a beaver dam, and something he never bargained for....

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Following his divorce, Dr. Stanley Gilford, chief of cardiology at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, restructured his life on the guiding principle of maximum gain, minimum pain. So what is the well-heeled doctor doing with Ruby, a high school dropout and waitress at the local greasy spoon, and what are his options visa vie the pallid, five year old boy whose damaged heart beats in three-four time?...

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Marcus is showing Andrea Simpson, the PhD psychologist who counsels hard-core offenders at the women's reformatory, how to construct whirligigs. Andrea, for her part, is teaching the woodworker a thing or two about the human condition....