After Izzy's lover Tim, an entomologist and ringmaster of a flea circus, makes an Irish exit out the airshaft window, she oscillates between madness and reason, failing to make any sense of it.

Staggering from the gut punch, she serves the drunks at Tim's brother's dockside bar, takes up with a purveyor of flea-breeding equipment who asks no questions, and slowly loses her grip. Every time she reaches for cold certainties, her mind skids off the road. Izzy can calculate the inexorable physics of falling and catalog the world into facts, but no matter what, every time, she hits the wall. She still can't make logic out of loss.

Driven by inevitability, a hot car, and an alphabet that doesn't quite end, what Izzy wants to know is, do you die of grief or do you kill it first?