. . .though those things are all better when love is involved. Love is cryptic and perverse, sneaky and strange. It happens when it shouldn’t, and doesn’t happen when it should. It happens inside heads where no one can see it, and it happens between the living and dead, people and cats, people and food, people and delusions, people and hope, people and themselves. And love is not even love. It can be hate. Yin-yang, the notion of everything carrying its opposite, is too often simplified as two halves of a whole. But the Chinese symbol of yin-yang has some yin in the yang, and some yang in the yin. Was the hatred that drove humans to destroy Nazi Germany an act of love? Well. All of which is to say that there are strange places in the heart, maybe nothing but strange places.

Here are twenty five stories about them.