This collection highlights Kristine Kathryn Rusch's recent award-nominated and award-winning (and collected in various Year's Best anthologies) short fiction. "Recovering Apollo 8," a Sidewise Award winner for Best Alternate History, a Hugo Award finalist, and winner of the Asimov's Reader's Choice Award, examines a very near-future where Apollo 8 would float forever in the darkness of space. An eight-year-old at the time of the loss, a wealthy pioneer of the space age devotes his life to recovering the capsule and the three lost astronauts. A companion short story also shows inspiration from Apollo 8 in "The Taste of Miracles. " In "The Strangeness of the Day," winner of France's Fantasy Award: Le Prix Imaginales 2003, a shy, successful lawyer is hired by a near immortal to battle a witch to save his love. Dying to the sound of banjo music---that's how it's done with Death's helper in "Substitutions. " An alternate history of the death of J. Edgar Hoover, and dark secrets about --