Rachel L Beitsch

Rain to Aifa and Other Stories Rachel L Beitsch

A woman with super powers waits despondently amid the ruins of a Tel Aviv train station for her country to redeem itself. A cadre of boys regularly breaks into a young woman's apartment just to rearrange the furniture. A visiting family contends with lukewarm hosts and a quantum-entangled house in Jewish suburbia. An aging dictator on a distant planet concocts a scheme to thwart the advisors who would take over the regime after his death. A middle-aged man receives a visit from his dead sister on the eve of Passover, and five childhood friends reminisce about the questionable film their parochial girls' school used to show the students. These and the other tales in this short story collection by author Rachel L. Beitsch-which range from the chilling to the triumphant, from the quietly devastating to the oddly magical-take readers through landscapes alien and familiar with free-handed humor, surrealism, and a touch of the macabre, lending an off-kilter aura of wonder to the otherwise mundane.