Claudia Ulloa Donoso is an expert at writing gently alienated characters. Sometimes, their dislocation is the result of geography. Occasionally, it stems from their social conditions: consider "Alarm," in which every sound and moment is skewed by the narrator's terror of her abusive partner, or "The Transfiguration of Melina," whose religious teenage heroine starts the story detached from her sexuality, and ends it anything but. More often, though, Claudia's characters are simply Martians: their perspective on the world is singular, whether they want it to be or not.