Missing seventeen-year-old Kai Dionne and his dog Talia. The search for these two spans a single day, morning twilight to late evening, from the time Kai leaps in a half-frozen river to save the dog to the hour he and Talia are recovered. Each person who comes to the river brings his or her secret needs and desires; each has known loss, and all are survivors: a homeless boy tries to find himself, his lost twin, his double; a childless mother grieves for her son and daughter; a man who shot his father recalls a tender, intimate night when the father was kind, and not afraid, and not...

Immigrants lost in the blistering expanse of the Sonoran Desert, problem bears, bats pollinating saguaros, a Good Samaritan filling tanks at emergency water stations, and the terrified runaway boy who shoots him pierce the heart and mind of Rosana Derais. Vanishings, the first story in Silence and Song, is a love letter, a prayer to these strangers whose lives penetrate and transform Rosana s own sorrow.
In Translations, the prose poem connecting the two longer fictions, child refugees at a multilingual literacy center in Salt Lake City discover the merciful translation of dance...