From a southeast asian jungle where the greatest safety is as close to the danger as you can get, to a suburban backyard where a neighbor's cat moderates a wounded man's personal crisis to communicate, bumping and other stories is all over the map. jack savage has assembled twelve very different tales including a ukrainian prisoner's account of the improbable events in an abandoned slaughterhouse leading to his twenty-fi ve year incarceration, a powerful off-stage player reminded that some turns of our past can never be reconciled with our present, and an estranged anniversary couple who forced to once again choose each other. bumping and other stories is an eclectic mix of stories about a past lost and found, a present rediscovered, a recurring dream and a living nightmare with justice to meat out, of a childlike wonderment, a life of learning lost, and two souls sharing one affl iction. the stories are hopeful and often ironic but all with a certain subjectivity that allows the reader a vote in the referendum of life's little trials. as bernard in savage's "bumping" puts it: "...the cavalcade of what-if´s that are still mine to ponder".