Her name says it all. But KaNoah's houseguest just doesn't get it, even during the dim days of a global pandemic. Tomato tells the humorous and ironic tale of mishaps when givers and takers are sequestered together in the age of COVID-19.

When eighty-two-year-old Miss Savannah goes missing one stormy evening, the entire neighborhood is set into a frenzy, and a laughable search ensues the next morning. As the hours pass, a woman admirer of Miss Savannah's wit and earnest advice makes a startling discovery—but it isn't Miss Savannah.

Isabelle Lamberton loves her philandering father but loathes her long-suffering mother. Time blisters as the woman must care for the man who'd terrorized the City, killed her father, yet saved her life. "The Porter's Muse" is a short story that tugs at the boundaries of difficult truths and a woman's journey through these entanglements.

Inspired by the poet Salvador Torres-Martinez, this short work of fiction is an immigration story, in a small way, which celebrates the fortitude of an undocumented, American-born Mexican, and the son to whom he gives the love of words and the courage to live them.While inspired, the story does not belong to Salvador. It is pure fiction.The powerful artwork on the cover is that of Cuban-American artist Vince Herrera.

Crossing the bridge onto Chaise's Key has its perils, so it seems. The luxurious coastal enclave on the west coast of Florida is home to the famous horror writer Thomas Twolane, who turns out to be the perfect instigator of a woman's wild tales. She's "Pooched," and Twolane knows it. But Mila and Mark Kratos, her closest friends, and the woman's husband, Wyatt, have grown tired of her eccentricities. And, unlike Twolane, they decide they're done playing along. But that's the end of the sto...

Girl-X, Holland, Concetta, and dead Aoife have been friends since boarding together at Saint Gabriel's Girls Academy in the 1970s. They shared everything—except the truth of their lives. And those kept secrets debilitate, until they are spared by a conjuring of letters through which dead Aoife annuls their pains and gives air to their suffocated voices.

When Concetta Pianto sang her Il dolce suono, the people on Bokeem slowed to listen. But no one ever asked why she sang so often. "Nor did they query the vibrant bruises, tracked downward from her face to her limbs." Background Music is a woman's story of societal denial and private suffering—though the pain is not Concetta's alone. There are others. A cross-dressing teen, a dutiful wife, and a mutt named Red-eyed Blue suffer, too. But no one ever asks—Why?