A boy sets off to trace the aquatic life in a local stream and is overtaken by the journey itself ... A single day of violence and comic absurdity separates an aimless young man from the confining reality he's known to the unimagined one he'll have to navigate. These are the opening entries in An Instinct for Movement, a collection marked by fraught relationships, shifting trapdoors, and the often unreliable instincts of its linking central character. From a blighted Mid-Atlantic city to pre-millennium San Francisco to the hills of California pot country to a woodland outpost in the Pacific Northwest: with each new dislocation, Michael Mattes strives for clarion, momentary truths born of human comedy.