Happenstance

Of the more than three hundred stories that appear on the pages of this book, the author offers a few excerpts to give the reader a sense of its content:After several nights of vigilance, two of the elves were captured and promptly throttled, and only then did their tribe move on. The people of the hamlet were free at last to take up normal life again. Before dawn one morning, he was found hanging from a rafter in the market with a rope cinched round his neck. Ever righteous anger might have saved Andréz, but never had he near enough.Jesus Christ heard the devil out and cast him back to hell. But Jesus was the Son of God, and Martín a mere upholder of mundane law. He picked up the bills, stuffed them in his pocket, and backed into the alley.A woodcutter and his son discovered the naked poet curled like a foetus on a bed of pine needles, an hour past dawn. The poet's body was covered with insect bites, and when roused, he displayed symptoms of a truly nasty head cold.When he was younger, it had always seemed to Joe that who he was at one moment remained consistent with who he was a moment after. But now as he tossed and turned in bed, it occurred to him that his former self might be as indeterminate as the color of flowers on a bush. Before he fell asleep that night, he concluded that the connection between past and present was purely a matter of happenstance.