Some of Angus Brownfield’s collection of nineteen short stories are told with tongue in cheek and some acknowledge the regret that comes of learning through sobering experience. One narrator is faintly hysterical, another trying to avoid the rat race that looms in front of him by reliving his hot-rodding youth in an automobile that’s beyond his rusty skills. There’s a variety of styles and lengths, an air of the fairytale, a breath of the homily, the authority of the fable. Many of the stories are set in your backyard. Two of them are set in Mexico, one barely over the border on The Day of The Dead, and the other at the last stop before the sweltering Guatemalan border. And throughout Time matters, slipping away until it’s nothing or sliding into an infinite future.