Nothing You Love Keeps

A husband asks his wife to hold his breath for him. Then to swallow his aspirin. Then to carry the death of his father, twelve years old and still too heavy for him to lift.

In a marsh town on the Jersey coast, a family settles its debts by writing them on a slate and pushing it into the mud at low tide - and by writing, underneath the numbers, a name.

Nine thousand years after a civilization walks west into the salt, a colony digs it up, and the dead begin speaking through the living.

The seventeen stories in Nothing You Love Keeps run on a single terrible mechanism: a burden moves from one person to another, and the person receiving it does not refuse. A man's loneliness is repossessed by birds. A house returns a dead brother in pieces. A boy catches Halloween in a paper bag while his best friend stands in the road and lets him.

Moving from domestic realism to the fabulist and the far-future, and from 240 words to 5,000, these stories share an unsentimental interest in what people hand each other and call love. Fisher writes grief through objects - a slate, a coffee tin, an index card, a cardboard box left at the curb - and refuses the consolation that understanding someone's suffering will make you kinder to them.