Breakfast with the Ones You Love

Meet Lea Tillim, aka Cadaver Dimples, Star of Morgues and Emergency Rooms. Scarecrow thin, with a sharp crew cut and a dead face, Lea's a girl with a talent. She can think you into a heart attack if you cross heror, if she's feeling kind, just a bad case of indigestion. She has only one friend in the world, her cat, Tule. You see, a girl like Lea can't be too careful whom she shows her talent to. In her experience it only leads to troubles and tragedies. Now it's led her to Jack Konar, who's secretly building something strange and wonderful in an abandoned section of the local Sears and Roebuck. According to Jack, it's all part of a master plan to rescue the Chosen from this godforsaken planet. But the agents of the Evil Onescleverly disguised as ordinary people and sometimes even catsare trying to stop him. Jack needs a girl with Lea's special talents. It would all sound just too crazy for words if the most dangerous and unexpected thing of all hadn't happened. After years of the best poker face grief could buy, Lea finds herself slowly coming back to life . . . and falling in love with the savior of the world.

Eliot Fintushel has published short stories in Asimov's, Analog, Strange Horizons, Amazing Stories, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Crank!, and in the anthologies Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids, Jewish Detective Stories for Kids, Nalo Hopkinson's Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Polyphony 4. His fiction has appeared in the annual anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction several times. He has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Nebula Award, and has twice won the National Endowment for the Arts Solo Performer Award.