30 STORIES ABOUT LIFE & DEATH

Colt offers a collection of flash fiction in which the heart lies in what’s not said.

A section of stories titled “Life” includes a tale of a philosopher who finds his salvation in listening (“In Aristotle’s Footsteps”) and another in which a farewell in a doorway could be an invitation to more (“Sticky Lips and the Stray Cat”); they are often about moments that are made sweeter by indecision. In “Gingerbread Love,” two people with deep but unrelated histories in the same location, both suffering loss, find a personal connection. That story and “The Deer Trail,” about a father-son hike that moves from non sequitur to natural disaster, offer a flicker of what burns brighter in the “Death” stories: themes that touch on the impact of memory and the duration of love. Stories in this second section more easily find their footing and take readers to complex places. “A Cold Little Secret,” for example, opens with cinematic immediacy as two men tracking polar bears near Barrow, Alaska, flip their four-wheel-drive vehicle in subzero conditions: “My slightly dazed friend grabs some rope and a chainsaw from the back seat before clambering onto the snow.” But the accident doesn’t cause the death that this story is about; it goes deeper than a surface skid on ice. Colt was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for “A Death in Quito,” one of the best stories, in which bearing witness becomes a bulwark against being alone. “Kansas City Ganges” and “Jungbu’s Mother” are tales in which Colt reaches creative peaks: Personal stories interweave and shifts of great enormity occur in the silence between words—and they deliver on an implicit promise in the book’s first section.

Stories that effectively reveal meaning in spaces that seem empty and build bridges between characters’ joys and sorrows.