EXIT ZERO

Twelve stories that slide into the magical while staying determinedly real.

The protagonists of Bertino’s stories tend to be beleaguered yet brave, quixotic yet stouthearted, bemused by but also compassionately attentive to the strange worlds they find themselves inhabiting. In the title story, Jo, a disaffected event planner for a national association of doctors, travels to her estranged father’s New Jersey home after his death only to discover that, in addition to the detritus of his mostly solitary life, she has also inherited his pet unicorn. In “The Night Gardener,” Claudia prepares her small patch of yard for the local Horticultural Society’s City Gardens Contest in a near-future world wherein species after species is succumbing to extinction. When balloons carrying messages seemingly meant just for her begin to appear in her garden, Claudia switches her focus from bearing witness to a departing world to attempting to communicate with what lies just over the horizon between the living and the dead, the present and the unimaginable future. Bertino’s characters—largely women living through interstitial periods between love affairs (“Edna in Rain,”), during the death throes of marriages (“Can Only Houses Be Haunted?”), between accident and aftermath (“Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher”)—are unique in their own right but also comfortable vessels for readers’ experiences of feeling adrift in a world that admits to no defining beginnings and no definitive ends. Even if the reader’s world does not include unicorns, semisentient balloons, or ex-lovers falling from the sky, it is a good bet the characters who experience these travails will remind us of our neighbors, our friends, even ourselves as we navigate their worlds in Bertino’s confident hands.

Ardently whimsical, yet never centerless—solid stories about our tenuous times.