When a piano falls from the sky above her, Veronica Silver takes cover in a subway station. But the lone figure that she finds there is a far more frightening force than what she's just escaped: he's a salesman. And what he's pitching are memories. Pretty pictures of Veronica's past reframed by the salesman's haunting question: "What if?" Pregnant at sixteen, but secretly in love with the girl driving her to the clinic to "make things right," conflicted Veronica decided to keep her baby. But now, eight years later, trapped in a loveless marriage to the father of her child, she questions every choice she's ever made. Would life be better if she finally came out to her homophobic dad, if she finally left her emotionally manipulative husband and moved in with the love of her life instead? Maybe, she thinks. But is "better" for Veronica necessarily better for her daughter Tracy? Or will Tracy be forced to wrestle with the fallout of Veronica's actions?

Three sons send their father to Valhalla in his old jalopy. A rusted robot waits on the stone wall by a child's bus stop. An undertaker is one coin short at the river Styx. In the fourteen yarns spun in this collection, E. Christopher Clark weaves the fabulous with the mundane, leading us through the maze of his imagination. Fathers and the daughters they find, girls and the dogs they've loved, and a woman from Kansas with a cyclone in her heart — find out what happens when people go too far, love too hard, and take too much as they make their way Out of the Woods.