Leaving the Dead

Leaving the Dead is a collection of eighteen stories about the long slow dance with death and the heartbreak of life-no zombies allowed.

• When a writer runs into the ghost of his father who died of Alzheimer's, death has restored his memory, and he's eager to share.
• An unlikely couple and an abandoned-seeing eye dog find happiness after everyone else dies.
• A college freshman goes home for the holidays with her lover who claims to be a robot-and takes her to an abandoned factory on Christmas Eve where she was born.
• A cat on death's door is miraculously healed by his owner, but lives on and on and never ages.
• When the broken dream factory shuts down, its most devoted worker has to figure out how the world will get along without broken dreams.
• A Confederate ghost whose grave marker is a stumpy stone with a number tells what he was really fighting for after the Segway tour has rolled away.
• In the Vietnam days when BF Skinner was king, a young man fasting to flunk his draft physical raises lab rats for the psych department to run mazes that always end with a one-way ticket to the herpetarium.
• A young poet turns his art into a religion for the inspiration and the tax break, and just maybe, immortality.
• A strong young woman hacking a home out of a mountainside thinks she has a rattlesnake problem until she learns to love them, and they love her back.
• A carnival performer sings a beautiful song and plummets to her death but rises to live and sing another performance, as long as someone in the crowd would willingly die in her place.
• In a triptych of novelettes an old man traces his alien roots all the way back to the mysterious geological feature known as The Abyss.