That Very Place

The characters in THAT VERY PLACE find themselves in settings-whether mundane or bizarre-that they'd rather avoid. Each is chasing or fleeing from a bond too deep to sever: an unwanted child, an unloving parent. Long-ignored troubles erupt into chaos, forcing them to confront the damage they've caused and the pain they can't outrun.In a nursing home's bleak room, a woman with advancing dementia confesses to her unsuspecting niece that she's actually her mother. But is it too late for the truth to matter?
At a wedding held in a garishly decorated Laundromat in Queens, a young woman hesitates to give up her child for adoption, torn between her own instincts and the certainty that the child's father will leave if she doesn't.
On the verge of crossing 7th Avenue, a directionless college student catches sight of a homeless woman who might be his estranged mother-and glimpses a potential doorway into a new life.
In the blistering heat of a baseball field parking lot, a girl grappling with her grandmother's worsening dementia and devastating loss finds clarity after a chaotic encounter with a wildly incoherent homeless woman.
In THAT VERY PLACE, the ordinary is infused with the extraordinary-things that simply shouldn't be happening. As these characters navigate their unraveling lives, they are confronted with choices and truths they've long ignored. What waits on the other side may finally illuminate what they've been missing all along.

Mary Ann McGuigan's short fiction appears in The Sun, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and many other journals. Her collection PIECES includes stories named for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her creative nonfiction can be found in journals such as Brevity, The Rumpus, X-R-A-Y, and The Citron Review. The Junior Library Guild and the New York Public Library rank Mary Ann's young-adult novels among the best books for teens, and WHERE YOU BELONG was a finalist for the National Book Award. You can subscribe to her free monthly newsletter, offering links to many of her published stories and essays, on her website: www.maryannmcguigan.com.