The Ice Mines

Seven stories about people in the dark.

A man wakes on a train three years after something happened in an abandoned ice mine, and tells a stranger in the bar car why he's going back.

A census taker in 1964 spends twenty-four hours hiding behind a wall of other people's clothing while a woman with a shotgun fires across a creek. He never does find out whose clothes they are — not until a five-year-old tells him.

An astronomer looks through an experimental lens and finds himself on the other side of it, three hundred million light-years from his own chair, watching a war nobody on Earth knows is happening.

A thief has himself convicted of a small burglary so that maximum security will be his alibi for a very large one.

A girl of thirteen asks for one birthday present — a weekend on her father's boat — and comes back alone at the helm.

And a seventeen-year-old sits across from a court psychiatrist and explains, calmly, what happened to her twin brother at a condemned mine in Oklahoma. She has told it eleven times. Nobody believes the part about the rats.

Seven stories, seven narrators, and not one of them is rescued by anybody but themselves. Some of them aren't rescued at all.

From the author of The Jack's Alive Trilogy and Lethal Injection.