In eighteen thematically linked stories, Colin Fleming explores the ways in which relationships end, with a focus on the void a loved one leaves behind. In “Fire with Legs,” the inhabitants of a noise machine discuss the end of a previous relationship, and the life that went with it. In “Playing in Room B,” an amateur videographer searches for his vanished wife in his movies, wondering when she started slipping out of the frame. In “Green Wood,” a man examines the death of his wife and the certainty of reality in a world where the TV program never changes. In “The Char Paper Blues Band,” a tiny group of professional musicians provides the background track to a couple’s life, from blissful harmony to the gradual souring of the song. Through magical realism and extended metaphor, Fleming explores the epiphenomena of failed relationships, the flotsam left behind in the wreckage of life as it was.
