A medical student writes a 1980’s power-ballad to her heavy metal-listening art teacher: a single father and glass blower named Moe. Images of molten glass hint evoke the fires of hell…and the demons that await Moe when he loses his health insurance.

A Viennese psychiatrist interviews Moussa, an unaccompanied Somali minor at Austria’s biggest refugee camp. Attempting to research resilience, our narrator instead discovers alienation: from her work, her family, her country—everything, really, but her patient.

In her prime, our narrator’s mother was creative, independent…and sometimes absent. Now she has late stage dementia, and her daughter must rescue her—if not in body, then in the memories attached to her collection of yellowing photographs.

A radiologist deconstructs a highly-restrictive genre—the radiology report—and then transcends it by writing in the first person. In the process, he grapples with uncertainty in medicine and strives to clinch a “zebra” diagnosis.