A psychic harnesses her talent for animal communication to extract a perfect revenge. A stone appears in a woman’s pocket like a charm, only to end up lodged in her partner’s throat. A condescending artist, who considers his girlfriend too conventional, throws a dinner party where he’s served a painful and consequential truth. Jess Gibson brings us 12 probing, sideways tales that wrestle with the limits of perception and possibility. The men and women in her stories confront contradictory forces: the beautiful can turn grotesque, the exalted can fall into disgrace, the genius can be proved an impostor.