A New Yorker attends a meeting for unemployed workers and the sleazy speakers leave him skeptical about his job prospects.

On the planet where humans are second-class citizens to the reptilian Peshari, a man nearing his death violates Peshari funeral customs in favor of an Earth burial. His defiance reveals a fatal flaw in his enemies.

A young woman is angered from beyond the grave when her family's greed denies her a proper burial, resulting in her becoming a vengeful spirit rather than moving on to the next stage of the afterlife.

A band of manual laborers bet their legendarily strong digger against a salesman’s machine in a competition to prove human workers’ worth.

A mother grieving for her late son spends sleepless nights watching him walk across her bedroom. One day, she receives news that his grave is to be dug up.

During WWII, a lieutenant's death prompts his father to plan an unnecessarily theatric funeral. The late lieutenant's brother is disgusted, knowing the dead man would have hated such an empty gesture.

In Iowa, a young violinist is asked to play at a famous poet's memorial. In the process, he gains a new perspective on who and why we grieve.

The crew aboard a freight ship are gruesomely murdered in a sacrificial and ritualistic manner.

A seventy-something-year-old woman dutifully visits her husband's grave only to realize that she contributed to the unhappiness of her marriage by letting her husband die lonely and unwanted.

When a postman in Trenton, New Jersey succumbs to tetanus, his fellow townspeople learn that he’d spent decades stealing their mail, leading to a town-wide hatred of the dead man.