This is a collection of stories for people who feel that reality is not the best deal going. Tim Conley explores the fragility of our perceptions as well as the illusions that we so badly need. Sometimes spare, these sixteen stories move between the obsessive and the disinterested, the extraordinary and the humdrum. In 'Means to an End', a man who has not quite come to the end of his rope meets a woman who wants to borrow it; in 'Constellation', an unforeseen meteorite destroys an astrologists convention; a taciturn botanist confronts his unfaithful wife in 'The Greenhouse Effect'; and in 'Last One In', an argument about which man has the better sense of hearing ends in disaster. Influenced by -- but expanding upon -- the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Queneau, and the European avant-garde, Conleys work combines realism with metaphysical concerns to create a comedic, yet always striking, first collection of fictions.