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When a Depression-era southern town suffers a series of inexplicable tragedies, life is interrupted for its denizens—including a womanizing mayor, the abused wife of a sullen locomotive engineer, an honest but compromised police chief, a minister that seems to levitate, a dying junk dealer, a Black preacher caught between two worlds, a brutal company guard, a diminutive railroad executive and master manipulator, and a group of church ladies prone to gossip.

Seventy years later, in Southern California, these stories are interwoven into the social trials of Taylor Bedskirt, a solitary widower with an obsession for trains, who falls desperately under the spell of an aggressive and careworn waitress, earns cautious acclaim from like-minded enthusiasts, and attempts to ward off a sister intent upon giving him a normal life.

What ensues is a trenchant and often humorous exploration of the fictions we create and how we come to believe them.