Jonathan returns to his small Massachusetts hometown from war to find his parents have locked him out, leaving cash and a note: they've discovered he's gay and want him gone. Shattered by PTSD, he can't look at anyone without imagining their deaths in grotesque, intrusive detail. Children's skulls slipping off, bodies exploding on impact, corpses rotting in plain sight. He drifts through diner shifts and anonymous encounters, waiting on letters from August, his childhood love, now hospitalized after being burned overseas. August's letters recount soldiers tortured and mutilated for being queer. Jonathan Lees' novella crawls toward their reunion beneath a maple tree, a bloodied, hallucinatory refuge against a world that wants them erased.