A consultation with an oncologist disrupts Jinny's resolutions and resignations, and she must confront issues she'd hitherto been content to let lie. Leaving her husband to his distractions, she allows a strange boy to drive her home by way of an unusual road. Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

The Floating Bridge, David Shumate’s second collection of prose poems, transports its readers over the chasm between the mundane and the enchanted. We traverse one bridge and find ourselves eavesdropping on Gertrude Stein and her gardener. We take the night bus to Gomorrah to have a look around. Halfway across, each bridge vanishes beneath our feet. Our world shifts. The commonplace begins to glow. We turn the page. Another bridge awaits.

The Missoula Technology and Development Center (MTDC) was asked to evaluate the use of floating bridges for trail crossings in very wet areas. This report outlines the basic designs of floating structures. It includes information about floating boat docks, floating bridge designs, anchorage systems, and devices that allow the dock to adjust itself to varying water levels. It also describes the situations where floating bridges may be a practical solution.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"—the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink—offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.