Award-winning novelist, screenwriter and playwright Bill Mesce, Jr. turns, for the first time, to short fiction in a gallery of pieces ranging from the familiar (an encounter at a winter-whipped commuter bus stop in "North") to the arcane (a lost cavalry patrol in the Civil War-set "Precis"), the sweet (a hopeful tete a tete at Parisian cafe in "Ad Vivum") to the bittersweet (a drifter marking time between busses in "Ante Meridiem"), the intimate (an altar boy's private rebellion in "Crusade") to the epic (the Vietnam War novella, "Diamond Red." Mesce's stunning first collection of short fiction grafts sharp images onto a landscape filled with compelling characters, characters who laugh and love and ache. His stories carry and a sense of immediacy, the truth of experience.