In eleven stories spanning the 1970s to the uneasy present, M.C. Schmidt writes about what remains after the choice is made, the person gone, the damage done. These are lives shaped by memory rather than event: parents we never forgave, children we couldn't reach, selves we left behind in rooms we'll never enter again.
A man returns to Lake Champlain decades after a boy drowned there, drawn by a stranger's disappearance he can't explain. A son quietly hangs wallpaper through the night while his father sleeps for the last time. The spaces between people—the unspoken, the unfinished, the irrecoverable—accumulate here into something devastating and true.
Tell Me Something Before I Show You is a collection about the cost of forgetting, the weight of unfinished lives, and the silence that settles when there is nothing left to say. Quiet, devastating, and deeply humane.
"A Triumph"
- Andrew Porter, Author of The Imagined Life and The Disappeared
