Showing Precarious: Stories of Love, Sex, and Misunderstanding by Al Riske

The stories in PRECARIOUS are about doing the right thing and regretting it. About men who are still boys. About making bets and dancing naked.

They play out in rain-soaked Seattle and drought-stricken California. In the front seat of Mom's Malibu and a vacation cabin on Cape Cod. On a tiny island and in a desert filled with light and heat and sand that slips through your fingers like friendships you once had.

In these fifteen stories you will meet a boy trying to make it through that summer between the end of high school and the start of something else. A girl so alive you can feel her heartbeat from half a mile away. A woman attracted to a man with muscles, because it makes her feel safe ... until it doesn't.  A man who can only imagine what it's like to sleep with many different women, but that's OK -- he has a good imagination.

In prose that is by turns spare and lyrical, the stories of Precarious capture the feeling of late summer. A never-ending game of Kick the Can. All sense of time lost among the stars.