What It Costs - E. Wieber;P. Guin

Most minds are stranger than we admit and more ordinary than we fear.

The conditions in these fifteen stories are real.

A parent who is almost certain that the child at the table is not her child. Someone whose left hand keeps taking their pen back and putting it away. A teenager watching their life from behind glass. Someone keeping their mornings going by pressing their palm to the wall to check what is real.

What It Costs is a collection about the gap between how a mind works and the world it has to live in. About the systems people build to get through ordinary days, what those systems cost, and what it means to find out that the problem wasn't what they thought it was. The work it takes to be.

The narrators here are not broken. They are managing. This collection does not explain its narrators. It does not tell you what to feel about them. It stays inside the experience of being a kind of person the world hasn't quite made room for yet.

Unusual is normal.