Kress likes to do "what if human bodies were changed..." stories. This one is: what if a symbiotic species inhabited a human such that it could make changes to the host but the person and symbiote could only communicate in a general sense. So the symbiote can make its host able to spit toxic saliva when threatened, or change the host's pigment and apparent age, etc. Set in an era where there's a breakdown in civil society because large numbers of US residents believe in witches (and want to burn them at the stake).

The Pieczynski piece features a woman in 1980s Sandinista Nicaragua who focuses the energy of the fighting between Contras and Sandinistas and turns it into sentient whirlwinds and golems.