"On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks...

An anthology of the bizarre. In The Rememberer, a man undergoes reverse evolution--from man to ape to salamander--at which point a friend releases him into the sea, while in another story a woman gives birth to her mother

Mona Gray has lived in a hidden world of numbers since her father became ill when she was a child, now at age 20 she helps children discover the joys of math when she finds herself teaching an elementary school math class.