"Life is just the last thought you have about it."- from an old man's notebookA garbage collector who befriends a peddler with a stranger's name. A retired businessman who plants a tree he will never see grow. A god who would rather not have been one. An old man whose memory holds only scraps of sunlight and a few scrawled lines of wisdom.Across eleven stories, this collection gathers lives that are rarely given to us whole. Some are tender. Some are unsparing. All of them arrive at the same quiet, difficult question: what do we owe the versions of ourselves that time will not give back?eleven storieseleven lives, held in fragments