❝In these dreams it's always you: The boy in the sweatshirt, The boy on the bridge, the boy who always keeps me from jumping off the bridge. Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued. Your jeep. Your teeth. The coffee that you bought me.❞ -I Had A Dream About You, Richard Siken Twenty-four-year old Eli Forbes isn't sure where he's headed after college graduation. He might know that he's getting a degree in Exercise Physiology in the spring, but fuck if he knows what he's going to do with it. For now, he's content with spending his winter break helping at his aunt and uncle's coffee shop. Sebastian Steine, a quirky wayward spirit, is double majoring in comparative literature and theater at Berkeley University. As all around him his friends begin to settle down, get married, and start families of their own, it becomes clear to Sebastian that he still doesn't have a clue as to what he's doing with himself. He's a floater and that's not as pleasing as it used to be. When the two meet at Forbes Family Coffeehouse, they begin to realize they have a whole lot more in common than just their favorite order of a simple black coffee.

Under the big top of Jensen Three Ring Circus, magical performances abound and tantalize the senses, but when the glitz and glory closes for the night, even the circus world cannot escape madness. Acrobat Kate the Great lives and breathes for the tightropes, the trapeze, the aerial hoops. In the air she is a free spirit with boundless joy, but on the ground, she’s a prisoner of unspeakable brutality. As her life spins out of control, a one night dance with the devil lands Kate in Rosenton Home for the Criminally Insane. It is here she is determined to make amends with her sins and to find a cure for her insanity. Her ward mates – a charming farm boy from Texas with a bewitching power to calm Kate, an older Mexican woman obsessed with beauty, a fourteen-year old girl who refuses to eat, a bizarrely upbeat young woman with her eyes on the farm boy, a giant with striking green eyes who lets no one in, and a sixteen-year old young man who shows no emotions beyond pure coldness – are the thin threads between her and becoming engulfed by unseen demons.