Kyle Filburn appears to have a picture-perfect life. He's entering his senior year, in a relationship with a great girl, on his high school's three-times-straight state championship soccer team, and an art professor from the local university has invited him to show and sell his work in his gallery.But a chance meeting with a midfielder from a rival high school creates cracks in this picture-perfect life. Kyle develops feelings for this boy, throwing him into confusion. What does he want? And with whom? And when an anonymous patron starts buying his art, Kyle starts to wonder whether he should really be pursuing art school rather than athletics.It becomes crystal clear that this picture-perfect life no longer reflects who Kyle is or who he wants to be...but what does that mean for Kyle? Joe Baumann's fiction and essays have appeared in Passages North, Third Coast, Electric Literature, and many other journals. His debut short story collection, Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise, was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Iron Horse/Texas Tech University Press First Book Award. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and lives outside St. Louis, Missouri. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
