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Nebula nominated short story. It was later expanded to a novel of the same name. The story originally appeared in The New Yorker, September 8, 2003 and can also be found in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2004), edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link.

Award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier delivers a spellbinding, supernatural tale of love, memories, and human connection. All residents of the City have recently died, and they will remain in the City only as long as someone still living on Earth remembers them. On Earth, however, the population has been devastated by a terrible pandemic. Laura Byrd, isolated at an Antarctic research station, may be the only person to have survived the pandemic. But she's running out of time and supplies, and her memories are fading.

What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?

From best-selling and award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier: a new novel of stunning artistry and imagination about the wounds we bear and the light that radiates from us all.

At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination commences. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely.

I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you.

The six recipients--a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor--inhabit an acutely observed, beautifully familiar yet particularly strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one's wounds glitter, fluoresce, and blaze with light. As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience.

This short story originally appeared in Unstuck 3 (2014), and was reprinted in Lightspteed, October 2015.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

From the award-winning author of Things That Fall from the Sky, a richly nuanced and deeply moving novel about the disappearance of a young girl, as told by her devastated father.

Celia is seven years old on the day she goes missing. Her father, Christopher, is giving a tour of their historic house; her mother, Janet, is at an orchestra rehearsal. Celia is outside playing. She rides her bicycle. She throws a rubber ball against the roof. She disappears.

A writer of fantasy and science fiction, Christopher finds himself drawn into a grief-induced world of wishful fantasy in which Celia still exists. Plunging into his work to help him cope with her disappearance, he writes of its effects from the points of view of the people who are still haunted by her absence: Janet, the policeman who is in charge of the case, and Christopher himself--each voice contributing to the heart-wrenching picture of a town subtly, but lastingly, changed.

The Truth About Celia is a novel of remarkable understanding--an extraordinary exploration of profound loss and inconsolable grief.

Kevin Brockmeier--award-winning author of The Brief History of the Dead--has been widely praised for the richness of his imagination, the lyrical grace and playfulness of his language, and the empathic emotional complexity of his storytelling. And this dazzling collection once again affirms his place as one of the most creative and compassionate writers of his generation.

In the haunting title story, a young, asocial woman remembers the oddly honest things she wrote in her high school classmates' yearbooks and contemplates her scarred life, imagining an escape with an apparition she calls the Entity. In "Father John Melby and the Ghost of Amy Elizabeth," a formerly dull and turgid pastor is touched by a spirit that turns his sermons into crowd-pleasers--that is, until he discovers his inspiration is a little less than divine. "The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device" is a gorgeous homage to the classic, young readers' choose-your-own-adventure novels. But this one is for grown-ups who can navigate through imagery and dead ends, and toward a resolution that only Kevin Brockmeier could have invented. From the fantastical to the concrete, the range of this collection is breathtaking. It moves fluidly, finding beauty in the quiet, often overlooked corners of the world.

By turns daring and moving, The View from the Seventh Layer is crafted with the remarkable voice and vision that have become hallmarks of Brockmeier's acclaimed fiction.

Unexpected humor and tenderness intertwine with loneliness and desire to create a whimsical ambience throughout the stories of Things That Fall from the Sky. In "These Hands," a male babysitter who claims never to have read Nabokov tells of his relationship, both constraining and exalting, with the small girl in his care. "A Day in the Life of Rumpelstiltskin" is the story of the bisected left half of the famous imp who is searching for his lost sense of wholeness. In "The Ceiling," a man's marriage slowly collapses as a massive object appears in the sky over his small town. And "The Jesus Stories" is the tale of a people who believe they can precipitate the Second Coming by telling every imaginable story about Jesus Christ.

Combining the simplicity of fairy tales with the physical and emotional detail of very adult lives, Kevin Brockmeier has found a voice unlike any other for the stories in this glittering collection.

A city in a bottle. Kings. Genies. Jane Austen and Frankenstein. Grandmothers at sea... The acclaimed Best American Fantasy series continues with 20 stories chosen by best-selling writer Kevin Brockmeier. With stories by established writers, such as Peter S. Beagle, Laura Kasischke, Jeffrey Ford, and Lisa Goldstein, alongside tales by brilliant newcomers like Kellie Wells, Thomas Glave, Ryan Boudinot, and Rebecca Makkai, Real Unreal delivers a richly diverse experience of contemporary fiction. Guest editor Brockmeier knows fantasy inside and out: he is the recipient of three O. Henry Awards, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award. His stories have been published widely, including The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, and The Oxford American, and have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and the first volume of The Best American Fantasy.

Table of Contents:

• Preface - essay by Matthew Cheney
• Introduction - essay by Kevin Brockmeier
• Safe Passage - (2008) - shortstory by Ramona Ausubel
• Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel - (2008) - novelette by Peter S. Beagle
• Cardiology - (2009) - shortstory by Ryan Boudinot
• The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children - (2008) - shortstory by Will Clarke
• For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing - (2008) - shortstory by Martin Cozza
• Daltharee - (2008) - shortstory by Jeffrey Ford
• Is - (2008) - shortstory by Chris Gavaler
• The Torturer's Wife - (2008) - novelette by Thomas Glave
• Reader's Guide - (2008) - shortstory by Lisa Goldstein
• Search Continues for Elderly Man - (2008) - shortstory by Laura Kasischke
• Pride and Prometheus - (2008) - novelette by John Kessel
• The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates - (2008) - shortstory by Stephen King
• Couple of Lovers on a Red Background - (2008) - shortstory by Rebecca Makkai
• Flying and Falling - (2008) - shortstory by Kuzhali Manickavel
• The King of the Djinn - (2008) - shortstory by David Ackert and Benjamin Rosenbaum
• The City and the Moon - (2008) - shortstory by Deborah Schwartz
• The Two-Headed Girl - (2008) - shortstory by Paul G. Tremblay
• The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death - (2007) - shortstory by Shawn Vestal
• Rabbit Catcher of Kingdom Come - (2008) - novelette by Kellie Wells
• Serials - (2008) - shortstory by Katie Williams
• Contributors - (2008) - essay by uncredited
• Recommended Reading - essay by Kevin Brockmeier and Matthew Cheney
• Publications Received - essay by uncredited