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Thirteen stories set in the space where fantasy and reality refuse to separate. An old man contemplates mortality through autumn leaves. A dark visitor calls on a man with manic depression. An unnamed creature lives in blackness, aware of nothing except its own existence. In each story, the familiar world is present but unreliable — a surface that keeps cracking open to reveal something underneath that doesn't operate by the rules the surface promised. Can Xue's fiction resists interpretation in the conventional sense: the stories aren't allegories waiting to be decoded but experiences that demand to be inhabited on their own terms. A collection for readers willing to abandon the expectation that stories should explain themselves — and who suspect that the most truthful fiction is the kind that doesn't.