"Touching the Widows" and other stories. (Original writing)

These are stories about loners whose lives open up unexpectedly. An artist in "Frida: A Nude Study" meets the woman whose image he has always yearned to paint; a bullet pierces the apartment window of a temp worker and his friend in "Assassination"; in "The Third Person" a receptionist receives a suicide note recorded on his telephone answering machine. And in the title story, a retired farmer finds new vitality after his wife dies. The men in these four stories hide themselves behind hard work, intellectual abstraction, and violence, looking at the world only from a safe distance. Human contact, however, threatens their invisibility.