After a retired inventor becomes widowed, he decides to take Latin classes and falls for his teacher despite his grief and hesitations.

In a near future where environmental collapse has progressed, a young woman and her crush illegally gather shed elk antlers to sell on the black market. Meanwhile, the woman's aging father, fixated on his impending death and consumed by guilt, attempts to square his ecological debts.

A bike worker's sudden mechanical epiphany leads to success for his partner, but something much worse for himself.

A story with an unconventional structure that asks "What is your number one priority?"

By trampling the grass as he walks the same route over and over to gather clams, an elderly man makes space for a bounty of primroses to flourish, which allows the moths and other pollinators to thrive. When he dies, the roses and moths follow suit.

With climate disaster looming in Florida's future, a struggling single mother finds herself battling crippling insomnia as she worries about her daughter's future.

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

While he pens an excuse to withdraw from a community project, a biology professor reflects on other times he avoided confrontation and ruminates on unresolved dilemmas in his life.

Shipwrecked on a planet whose extreme environment speeds their heart rates, generations of humans age rapidly, living only 8 days each and warring with one another for a cavern that extends the human lifespan to 11 days. When a young man and his girlfriend make it to the only remaining, functional ship, they find that, on the ship, their heartrates and lifespans are extended to normal.