Fiction Pick of the Week: "Evidence"
A detective, a mysterious murder, an unexpected confrontation.
Death
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Meat"
Dead bodies and small town sexual identity.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Bird (on Back)"
A couple deals with animal complications, unhappiness, and terminal illness.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "How To Fall In Love"
Lessons for dating and dying.
Unearthing the Secrets of New York's Mass Graves
Over a million people are buried in a potter’s field on Hart Island. Here are some of their stories.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Returning"
A woman's dead father appears at a farmer's market.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Step In"
A mysterious stone and the complexities of grief.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The Tragic Tale of the Baron and His Wife"
A story of blame.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Elephant Man"
A young girl uses unusual coping mechanisms after her father's death.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Corpseless Shrouds"
A woman recalls an endless lifetime of near-death experiences.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Six Months Dry"
Sober living, loss, and unexpected connections.
The Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death
A step-by-step account.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Do Not Save the Ferocious, Save the Tender"
A shipwreck, a mythical creature.
There Will Be Blood
When your job is making it seem like body decompositions, suicides, and murders never happened.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Briar Switch"
A dangerous trek to visit a dying father.
This Is a Story About Loss
On finding something at Unclaimed Baggage Center, the Alabama store that sells what America loses.
The Lonely Death of George Bell
And the task of unraveling his life.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Public Debt"
David Hosack attends to a mortally wounded Alexander Hamilton.
"Hosack felt a hitching panic build, his instincts wound too tightly, overtaxed, a clockwork spring about to snap. Only Hamilton could do this to him. The frame prone before him was frail, narrow, woman-small. His coat, waistcoat, shirt, underclothes sopping him up, holding him together. Delicate embroidery sodden, delicate fingers cold with the loss of blood. Hosack had seen this man’s blood before, and the blood and vomit and delirious fever-dreams of his wife, his children. But this was—Hosack sickened, the scene before him tilting. Three years before—Hamilton’s son, Phillip, bleeding out after his own duel on the same Weehawken site. Their faces so alike, their mangled bodies. Their right sides."
Who Owns the Dead?
Inside the home funeral movement.
Crossover Potential
A mortuary employee surveys her scene.
This Is What Happens After You Die
The process of decomposition, recounted in painstaking detail.
Death, Redesigned
A few Silicon Valley executives are experimenting with mortality. “I don’t want death to be such a downer,” says one.
The End
We are all going to die. So what does it look like?
Death Becomes Him
Learning about death from a sixth-generation funeral director.
Retreat From Battle Now?
Details from a Lord of the Rings fantasy game interrupt details of a tragic, complicated personal life.
"Right about now, I assume you’ve gotten a bit bored. Dead babies! Let me tell you, dying babies bore the shit out of pretty much everyone, I’ve learned. So, let me take a moment to tell you a humorous LOTRO anecdote (that is, Lord of the Rings Online) about my level 25 minstrel character, Sinuviel. You see, LOTRO is free up to a point, and great fun if you have access to a computer that is badass enough to run it. Just before my fiancé, James, died, I bought a refurbished ASUS laptop for dirt cheap, and it was the best thing in the world for distracting me from how boring my dying child was to everyone I’d ever known."
