After his death, a Judge converses with an old friend and a philosopher about the reality of an afterlife and grapples with the idea of regaining people he’s missed his entire life.

To cut costs during the mid-21st century financial crisis, a biotech company promising immortality disposed of some of its cryogenically preserved bodies. But one of its employees secretly held on to one of these bodies—a young woman who died of cancer in her twenties—and has been obsessed with taking care of her ever since.

An adult son is living with his parents when they begin to take stronger measures toward kicking him out. They’ve dropped him from the family phone plan, put a lock on the refrigerator, and now have put an official court-approved eviction notice on his door. His parents aren’t sure what went wrong with him. “He had every advantage. We loved him, we still love him, our only child, who came to us as the sweetest and truest blessing from God when I was forty-one and so empty inside…” The son doesn’t understand what his parents are thinking. How is he supposed to get a job without cell service or a car, which he doesn’t have anymore since his parents won’t loan him the money to take it to the shop? When his mom comes home from work, he storms out with the eviction notice in hand to yell at her, and she thinks about how he doesn’t even remember that it’s her birthday. He asks her, “You want me to die?” and she says, in her anger, “‘Yes,’” and then, “‘If you’re going to die, go ahead and do it—but do it someplace else, will you? Will you at least do that for us?’” She immediately says she doesn’t mean it but he’s already storming away. Now, the son is thinking about his own son, which he had on accident when he was a teenager. He’s not on great terms with the mother, and he thinks his mother resents that he’s made it hard for her to see her grandson. The son tries to find a lawyer to help him sue his parents for breach of contract, that “by virtue of their giving me my own room in the house since I was an infant and freely letting me move back in when I had no place else to go, they had entered into an unwritten contract to provide me with shelter, and that, even if it was within their rights to evict me, they at least had to give me six months’ notice, because you can’t just throw somebody out in the street, unless you’re in some country where they randomly kick down doors and put people in concentration camps.” He loses the case. After a lot of stalling, he moves out, and his son and the mother of his child move into his old room. His new apartment is less than ideal and so are the people he’s hanging around. He no longer talks to his father, but his mother puts him back on the family’s phone plan and now calls him every day. She mainly wants to talk about his son. She wants them to spend more time together. She sends him pictures his son drew in school: "fish in tanks, squirrels and dogs and cars, the usual sort of thing, except for one that said ‘Dad’ on it in big red bleeding letters and showed a kid’s face, his face, obscured by a swarm of floating misshapen blobs that I finally figured out were teardrops, as if he was sending me a message.” He figures his mother or the child’s mother put his son up to it. He thinks “the kid was no artist and you couldn’t really what [the blobs] were supposed to be.”

An 83-year-old man's wife dies in her sleep. The next morning, the man carries her body across a bridge from their isolated creek-side home to the undertaker at the nearest town.

In the days after his wife dies, an older man must confront his newly solitary life, both the good and the bad.

A famous poet wakes up in the afterlife but wishes to be alive, and death offers her a deal. If she kills a boy, she can live for 25 more years.

An elderly man struggling with his failing memory receives a visit from a mysterious doctor.

When a widowed aunt who is rumored to have an inheritance of half a million dollars in the 1980s, the local undertaker attempts to sell her niece and nephew a casket and plan her funeral service while also dealing with his personal love life.

In a futuristic world where hardly a trace of natural life exists untouched by human interference, a Citizen makes an unprecedented choice that brings a slew of notoriety and ethical questions.

A greedy old landlord contemplates the end of his life as his tenacious tenant's demands of reparation for his wife's death drives him closer to madness. Nearing the end of his life, a stingy landlord refuses to pay for his tenant's funeral bill and becomes entranced by a pregnant squatter on his property.