Denise
A cab driver picks up a lost-looking tourist at 7:30 AM at Fisherman's Wharf wearing a chartreuse sweatshirt and clutching a cardboard box full of his brother's ashes.
Jane
Driving to a meeting of professional psychologists, the dreamer's car veers off to the left into a field of boulders and comes to a halt amid the massive stone monoliths at the neolithic site of Avebury. A pair of brilliant green hummingbirds greet the woman as she emerges from the subway.
Robert
A flamboyant uncle disappears mysteriously and leaves a velvet-draped mansion in New Orleans to his style-conscious San Francisco-based architect nephew, David. David flies to New Orleans where he has to piece together the details of the on-Broadway/off-Broadway uncle's life as a costume designer by means of a box of old Christmas letters and with the help of two aging vaudevillians in their eighties who knew him as well as a Creole fortune teller named Mistress Hattie. Lush.
Susan
Since the days of her arrest in the early 70s as part of an underground cell of revolutionaries in Venezuela, this writer has been discovering new ways to help progressive activists, feminists, civil libertarians and anarchists connect with each other beyond their differences.
Stephen
An emergency room doctor tries to capture the unique stories of the
individuals he's cared for, in reflections full of pathos, humor, and
doubt. His stories are set in a village hospital in western Zambia,
in a clinic tent in Bolivia, and an urban trauma center in the United
States. Writes Stephen in one piece, "He looks at me with a
gaze that acknowledges the fragility of everything meaningful."
| 
