In these fourteen stories of growing up, hanging on, and getting old, Elizabeth Inness-Brown maps a territory of loneliness and love. Here is the sanctuary of the solitary mind, the land to which the unwanted exile themselves, the place to which we all retreat when life becomes too hot to touch. With wit, affection, and finesse, this collection shows us the dark side of our moon, the unfamiliar side that we nonetheless recognize as soon as we see it. Through the eyes of an eleven-year-old girl, "Territory" takes us to the feral world of childhood, its innocent cruelty and ritualized sexuality. In the tough and ironic "Really Love Him," a woman riding out the last of the seventies ends up "visiting with people I was pretty sure I didn't like, drunk to the point of being sick, sleeping with a man I didn't feel anything for." Here, like it or not, is where most of us have been. Here, too, is how far we are willing to go. In "The Housesitter," a thirty-something graduate student takes care of a vacationing couple's house and, in an eerie transmogrification, literally loses himself in his work. "The Surgeon" casts disease as both metaphor and ultimate reality, as a doctor tries once more to love his dying wife. In "Traveler," a woman finds herself so deep in a charade of identities that she is swept away, swiftly and unerringly propelled toward danger and revelation. Under the sensual and sometimes fanciful surface of these fourteen stories lurks a dark reality: what any of us will do, desperate for love. But within the reality gleams a kind of measured transcendence, the kind of reclaimed innocence and balance that come only from accepting things as they truly are.