"The Painfully Slow Seduction of Aldus Lamb" by Christopher Hawkins is a tale of patience and devotion, of enduring all in the name of True Love.  What would you give, what would you endure, to gain your heart’s desire?  Whether you view Gina Wolfe’s feelings for the unattainable Aldus Lamb as love or obsession, her unswerving devotion to the cause is clear.
 
Gina is an attractive woman, skilled in the arts of seduction, but all her best efforts, which reduce the other men in the office to drooling idiots, have no apparent effect on Aldus.  Her campaign to appeal to his intellectual side meets with the same lack of results.  After five years of trying everything she can think of to attract Aldus’s attention, she finally consults a mysterious woman—gypsy fortuneteller? witch?  voodoo priestess?—who offers her a potion that will do the trick.  As with all such manifestations of the black arts, there is a high price to pay, and though it works as promised, the results are not quite what Gina had in mind.
 
"Under the Bed" by A. C. Wise begins with sad but unfortunately too-common circumstances: a tired, battered wife hides her frightened child from his abusive, drunken father.  "Don’t come out for anyone but me. I’m going to come back for you, you understand? I love you very much and I need you to hide and be very quiet. Don’t make a sound and no matter what, don’t come out."
 
Most children would eventually disobey, would be forced out of hiding by hunger and other bodily needs despite their fear.  Most children would eventually cry or scream or do something that would make their presence known.  Not this one. Trapped in a waking nightmare, he suffers in silence. 
 
As if one terrified child weren’t enough, Wise ups the tension by introducing a second frightened child.  Will the second child overcome his fears to help the first?  Will the second child’s mother intervene?  Wise keeps us reading, alternately tantalizing us with hope of rescue and ratcheting up the horror.  We seesaw back and forth, feeling each child’s fear, riding that runaway train on the book’s cover toward inevitable disaster.

We all know that psychological problems can produce physical effects.  "Marcum’s Teeth" by David Bell takes us into an alternate reality where fear of mortality manifests as dreams of losing one’s teeth, and sometimes the dreams become waking fact. 
 
Professor Stephen Marcum experiences the sudden loss of a perfectly healthy tooth.  Naturally, he consults his dentist, who can only tell him, "Sometimes these things just happen. It’s rare, but I’ve read about similar cases." 
 
The process repeats, until Stephen, in desperation, seeks a second opinion.  One of his students has noticed his plight and recommends her dentist father, who offers the psychological explanation.  So the solution to the tooth loss is to stop obsessing over death.  Easier said than done, as circumstances unfold. 

"Teapot in the Well" by Bonnie Mercure explores the nature of love and the danger of caring.  Dave is an orderly in a mental institution; Angela is a beautiful young woman who, they claim, murdered her baby.  In spite of his abhorrence of her crime, Dave finds himself drawn to the disturbed girl.  Angela tries to keep him at a distance, as she does anyone who begins to care about her.  Is she afraid of human contact, or is she a victim of circumstances, sacrificing her need for closeness to protect others?  "Love came to me bearing a rose," she said. "I accepted it and everything that came with it. How was I to know it was wrong?"
 
Bad things happen to anyone who gets close to Angela.  Is she a homicidal maniac, or is something else going on?  And where are all those twigs coming from?
 
As he deals with the variously delusional inmates, Dave wonders, "Where do imaginary figures go when the people who imagine them can’t find them? Do they fade into nothing, or somehow travel into other unstable minds to say howdy?"  The lines between sanity and insanity waver here; in some cases the "insane" may simply be observing a reality that the "sane" refuse to see.

"The Curse" by Barton Paul Levenson takes us to Haiti, where we meet a simple but happy man, Armand du Plessis.  He owns a horse and wagon, and makes an adequate living driving his neighbors to the market at Port-au-Prince.  He drives only once a week, because that’s all the money he needs.  The rest of his time he spends fishing.  Once a week he visits a prostitute named Marie, and at Christmas, he celebrates by splitting a bottle of brandy with her.  His idyllic existence takes an unexpected turn for the worse when a pedestrian stumbles and falls under a wheel of his cart.  Yes, it was an unavoidable accident, but try telling that to the victim’s widow, who happens to be a powerful witch with a thirst for revenge.
 
One of the more optimistic stories in this collection, this one carries us beyond disaster and suffering to a level of peace, showing the redemptive qualities of acceptance and forgiveness.

"A Road Like This, At Night" by Lon Prater is a ghost story, of sorts.  Secrets have a way of coming out.  In this bittersweet tale, a bereaved father, driving his dead daughter’s car home after her funeral, is haunted by a series of episodes in her life, memories that seem to be attached to the car, waiting to be triggered.  How well do any of us know our children or any of our loved ones?  We might be surprised or even shocked at the experiences they’ve had, the things they chose not to tell us.  Would we, like this father, have the sense to realize that we still love them, no matter what?

"The Devil You Know" by Terri Fleming starts prosaically enough.  Oh sure, there’s a teaser promising a spectacular, gory death scene, but it still seems to be rooted in the real world.  There’s a teenager who covets her older sister’s favorite skirt, a bunch of kids hanging out in the park on an October night, a boyfriend-girlfriend argument—nothing out of the ordinary.  A simple, formulaic horror story.  The monster or serial killer or whatever should turn up any moment, and we can pretend to be shocked or frightened, but we can pretty well predict the events to come.  Then the story takes a sharp turn and things get stranger and stranger.  Fleming leads us so smoothly from the merely terrible to the totally bizarre that the most outrageous situations take on a certain credibility. 
 
Think you know all about the "adult conspiracy?"  Fleming’s version is a little different, but the disenchantment is just as great.  "Mothers make everything better; that is, until you really know them. What happened later forever changed my opinion. Part of me will never trust her, and I will always think she’s a *ing lunatic."

What would you risk, to achieve your heart’s desire?  Would you even think about the negative possibilities if you thought there was a chance?  In "Lost and Found" by Trent Roman, two boys discover a magical lost-and-found box in the local library.  Put in a note describing what’s lost, and the box will have it for you the next day.  The temptation grows to go beyond long-lost toys and other minor possessions.  Would the box know the difference if you asked for something you always wanted but never owned?  Will it give Bobby the mountain bike he covets?  What if it’s a person you lost?  Can it bring back Rick’s dead mother?  Like "The Monkey’s Paw" and other cautionary tales of magic boxes, cornucopias, or wishes, this one warns us to be careful of what we ask for.