Where these came from.

Nothing here arrived out of nowhere.

Every Sojourn story is built on the bones of an older one. Not a retelling — you would not spot most of them while reading — but a structure borrowed on purpose, because the shapes that have survived four hundred years of being told aloud survived for a reason. Underneath that, sometimes, there is a spark: a song, a film, a thing that actually happened.

Working out which old story fits which new one is the part I could not have done alone. Nobody I know carries four hundred years of narrative architecture in their head. A model does — and finding Lysistrata for a story about ants brokering peace is retrieval. Deciding that ants brokering peace was a story worth telling is not.

Both layers are listed below. Nothing here goes further than a story's own description already does — no endings, no turns you were not already promised.

The launch stories

The Bird and the Deep

A tern and a whale in love. Built on The Gift of the Magi — two lovers who each give up the one thing the other loves them for. The spark was Tom Waits' “Fish and Bird”, which is the whole story in three minutes and got there first.

The Alpaca and the Ice Cream Man

Two broke strangers, a dying ice cream truck, and an alpaca who has to be home by Monday and cannot be allowed to overheat. Built on Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon — a mismatched pair bound by circumstance, crossing the heartland in close quarters. The spark was Midnight Run, which is the same film with more Robert De Niro f-bombs, plus a little Little Miss Sunshine in the vehicle that keeps threatening not to make it.

Half a Mile to Burma-Shave

Tom Waits wrote “Burma-Shave” in 1977 after seeing the sequential roadside signs as a boy and concluding that Burma-Shave must be a place — somewhere far off and worth getting to. His song takes that into tragedy. This story keeps the longing and leaves the crash behind. Under it: Big Fish, for a tall tale told straight, and The Phantom Tollbooth, for a bored child on a journey inventing somewhere to be going.

Have You Seen Him?

A street musician nobody stops for, and a zebra loose in Nashville that everybody is looking for. The one story here with no single literary sibling: its comic engine comes from The Onion's “Ninja Parade Slips By Town Unnoticed Once Again” — the thing impossible to miss that everyone somehow keeps missing — and its telling from the tall-tale register, in the Animal Chin mode where the searching matters more than the finding. Inspired by a true story, and the only one in the catalog that started with a news item.

Old Light

An experiment in absence: a bedtime story with no human protagonist and almost nobody in it at all. What carries it is a single thread of light, leaving its star on the only journey it will ever make. Built on Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot — cosmic scale deployed to make one small thing precious rather than to make it small — and on the plain astronomical fact that to look at a distant star is to look at the past.

Catch and Release

A fish-out-of-water story with the usual condescension reversed: the city regulars are the experts and the rural master is the rookie. Grounded in the real Gulf Coast Vietnamese fishing communities of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

This is the one with the most rules attached to it, all of them about what it must not become. Her heritage can never be exotic spectacle, costume, or a documentary lecture. The moment her real skill surfaces cannot be a vindication speech — nobody gets to say you all thought a woman couldn't. And the men who underestimate her are not bigots to be defeated: good men, wrong guess. Getting any of those wrong turns a warm story into a score being settled.

Keeping You Company

An overnight coach, a stranger who will not stop talking, and a road she could ride with her eyes shut. The spark was Planes, Trains and Automobiles — the compulsive talker and the person who wants silence, thrown together by a schedule neither of them controls — and the bones of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful were fitted to it after: a bus journey toward a home that has all but vanished. It shares an arc with both, and with The Ballad of Wallis Island: the irritating companion — John Candy's Del Griffith is the definitive case — whose excess turns out, late, to be carried grief. This one takes the gentler end of that. Nothing here jolts someone who is half asleep. There is no magic in it at all. The wonder is a whole marriage folded into a bus timetable.

Long Distance

A small-town telephone operator discovers that the work of connecting people outlasts everything, including her. Built on the third act of Thornton Wilder's Our Town — the dead watching the living, clear-eyed and without bitterness.

Two problems had to be solved before it could work as a bedtime story. The premise its own description gives away — that the work outlasts her — puts the narrator on the far side of an ending, and that tips macabre unless she is curious rather than mournful. So it arrives gently, early, and is never treated as tragedy: a warmth on the line, never a haunting.

The second was harder. A story that rides the telephone from 1948 to now curdles the moment it suggests people connected better back then. The rule written into its brief was charmed, not appalled — the form keeps changing, the thing it carries never does. Get that wrong and it is a greeting card with a grievance.

The Last Table

Three nights, twelve people, everything she has. Built on Babette's Feast — an artist who spends everything on a single act of generosity — performed here in a kitchen with a burner that lights on the third try.

The Army Ants' Accord

The same itch as Old Light, scratched somewhere else entirely — a challenge to myself to write a complete story with no people in it anywhere, human problems handed over to animal communities and left to work themselves out. The most feared army in the forest decides to broker peace, and brings the same terrifying efficiency to it. Built on Aristophanes' Lysistrata — ending a conflict by absurd and unexpected means. Nobody in it speaks a word.

Bottled Daylight, Half Price

A peddler sells impossible things that work, though never the way the buyer intended. Built on The Music Man — a charismatic outsider arrives selling something impossible and is changed by the town before the town is changed by her.

One decision holds the whole thing up: she is a trickster, not a wounded healer. No trauma in the backstory, no secret sorrow explaining the patter, and the goods are not a con — they genuinely work. The moment you explain a charming rogue by way of an old injury, you have written a different and much more familiar story.

The Garden at the End

An impossible garden behind an ordinary door. Built on The Secret Garden — a hidden place that heals the people who tend it.

This is the one everything else was built on. It was written first, and for a long stretch it was the only one there was — the whole premise, read aloud a night at a time, with choices that bend what comes after and sound underneath the words, was tested and rebuilt against this story before there was an app to put it in. In March 2026 I read its first night aloud to my wife off a laptop on the home network. She asked for the next one. That was the proof any of it worked.

The Unmappable Town

A city that quietly rearranges itself to match her maps, and an apprentice who can see both versions and is losing patience with each. Built on Don Quixote — a visionary whose unshakeable idea of how the world ought to be organized meets a world with other plans.

Quixote turns up here more than any other blueprint: four separate stories lean on him, more than twice the next most-used. That is not something I planned. The unshakeable idea, pursued well past the point where the evidence supports it, is the shape I keep coming back to — in the stories and otherwise — and I have stopped pretending that is a coincidence.

The Bureau of Missing Things

A lost-and-found where the lost things have built a life without you, presided over by a basset hound. Built on Toy Story — a community of objects with inner lives and real social bonds, for whom being reclaimed is not a rescue but a departure.

A room full of lost property wants to be melancholy, and the entire story depends on refusing that. The Bureau is warm, working and content — a good place for lost things, not a sad one. Single gloves have paired off with single gloves from entirely different sets, and it suits them. The one rule underneath: whichever way the claimant decides, it has to cost something. There is no right answer available.

The Impossible Winds

Kites that find winds no instrument can measure — a thermal that exists because three people on a beach are watching it. Built on Peter Pan — the border between play and responsibility, with the child who will not cross it treated gently. The lightest thing in the catalog.

The music

Every story is scored to something real — a particular piece by a particular composer, chosen before a note of the story's own music was written. Those names are deliberately not here. A score does its work on you before you could name it, and having the answer in advance spoils something small that belongs at the end of a story rather than the front of one.

Who they were for

Every story here was made for one person before it was made for anyone else. My wife did not get bedtime stories as a child. This is fifty of them, arriving late. Whatever else becomes of Sojourn, that part is already finished.

Coming to iPhone soon.