For years, my words served a paycheck. They were crafted not to linger, but to persuade. Advertising, they call it. The art of the fleeting phrase, the economy of language— Why say ‘lackadaisical’ when ‘lazy’ will do? Why ornament when a tagline is enough? Long form writing had no place in my world. And yet, this book—this unwieldy thing—arrived. The stories within it are relics of my days in advertising. The ones that never made it. The ideas too odd, too unruly to be shaped into commerce. Still. They are what I have felt in people and wished for them. And in their own way, they are human maps of where we are and where we could be. There is no single genre to contain them — modern folk tales and science fiction, thrillers and legal drama, a Western noir even. They formed freely like Playdoh, pressed and shaped by nothing but curiosity. I did not know I needed to tell them until the telling began. And within them, tucked between the lines, are things that belong in my own journey—my contradictions, my wanderings. There are no flawless heroes here, only people, broken and whole in the same breath. Fearful and fearless, seeking and found, made and remade. We are never just one thing. In these pages, there are questions we don’t want to answer, questions often unasked, unvoiced. None of it was deliberate; all of it is true. Ink is naked in that way. It reveals what we do not always mean to show. These stories breathe. But they suck out the oxygen from our assumptions. Read them in order or at random. One at a time or all at once. They are yours now. - Paul