The Demon of Longing — Gail Gilliland

The sixteen stories collected here, published individually over a period of fifteen years, take the reader from the freeways of Los Angeles to the train stations of small towns in Italy, from the familiar bustle of a Boston suburb to the timeless strangeness of the Berkshire hills. Each of the characters in these stories face the demon of longing in some life-altering way. Theirs is the last devil to be cast out, the one that poses the ultimate question―What if it were possible to make another choice? A Vietnam vet, brewing Lapsa Oolong in the Albuquerque motel room he calls home, reflects on the quiet pink morning when he first experienced the intuitive powers of the human mind. A middle-aged professor, trapped in her house in Newton during a blizzard, writes a letter to the Silicon Valley French teacher who became her first love after high school graduation. A shoe repairman in the depths of the Berkshires attempts to unravel the connection his second wife has made between their crumbling marriage and the frozen body of a woman that has been found by hunters in the woods. A fragile young woman “disappears” when she learns that her lover's wife is pregnant with their second child, and finds the strength to admit there may never be an answer to, What if?