In the midst of a brutal winter, a man commits an unspeakable crime. A decade after the fact, the fallout is pieced together by another man who was once a friend of the perpetrator. But as the free man tells the prisoner''s story, his words become marked by his efforts to do justice to all of the people whose lives have been touched by this singular event-and his search for a means of imaginative sympathy that might rescue the victim from her degradation.

In 2018–2019, Splice published three collections of stories—Dana Diehl’s Our Dreams Might Align, Michael Conley’s Flare and Falter, and Thomas Chadwick’s Above the Fat—each of which, in its own distinctive way, unwove the veil between reality and the irreal. Now, in this first anthology from Splice, the authors of those collections come together with new work and new affinities, each one paired up with a new author of their choice whose fictional world shares a border with their own. So Reneé Bibby, Abi Hynes, and Victoria Manifold enter the company of Splice’s explorers of ethereal, and the points of slippage between our world and others multiply in these pages...

In the midst of a brutal winter, a man commits an unspeakable crime. A decade after the fact, the fallout is pieced together by another man who was once a friend of the perpetrator. But as the free man tells the prisoner''s story, his words become marked by his efforts to do justice to all of the people whose lives have been touched by this singular event-and his search for a means of imaginative sympathy that might rescue the victim from her degradation.

In 2018–2019, Splice published three collections of stories—Dana Diehl’s Our Dreams Might Align, Michael Conley’s Flare and Falter, and Thomas Chadwick’s Above the Fat—each of which, in its own distinctive way, unwove the veil between reality and the irreal. Now, in this first anthology from Splice, the authors of those collections come together with new work and new affinities, each one paired up with a new author of their choice whose fictional world shares a border with their own. So Reneé Bibby, Abi Hynes, and Victoria Manifold enter the company of Splice’s explorers of ethereal, and the points of slippage between our world and others multiply in these pages...