When People Seem Most Alive

At first, Blood Secrets seems an odd title for this latest collection of Nadine McInnis’s short stories. The term, to me, implies race and genetics, the maimers and killers that lie dormant, the unpredictable and merciless inheritance of birth.

Instead, McInnis’s subject is dying. Most of the 13 stories in Blood Secrets take place in hospices and hospital rooms as family, friends, nurses and volunteers watch over the final moments of a life, the narratives spinning into the past and the future but always returning to that split second when the heart with its flow of life blood stops.

A question McInnis asks in one story could apply to them all: “Why is it that people seemed most alive when they would soon be gone?”

Blood Secrets begins with “The Story of Time,” named for a bleak sound-and-light show that marks the end of the millennium and the beginning of an affair for Joyce. As the crowd leaves, she is swept away from her...