A man falls for a woman after her death.

(from Zoetrope Vol. 5, No. 1)

It seemed natural as rain for a second, when Meredith said it, that the girl he’d been feeling guilty about had died, as if it happened only to make him feel like more of a heel.

I really enjoyed this story. It was surprising and entertaining and full of strange characters and the possibility of sex. I admire the way Powers wove two seemingly separate stories together. One story is about a man who’s trying to buy a house when all he can afford is a shotgun shack in a bad neighborhood, and the other is about a man who is relentlessly pursued by the family of a dead woman he hadn’t liked much in life. There were a few ugly sentences here and there, and I got tired of Powers describing the sparseness of the narrator’s hair (three times in one story?), but I’m trying not hold it against her. At least not too much. You can read it here. Oh! And it’s also set in Austin. I love reading stuff set in my city.