A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
A calendar event within the story.
At a solemn funeral, the widow looks once more through the coffin glass and screams.
Neighbors keeping vigil beside a dead woman in her mountain cabin witness something they cannot explain.
A writer tends a wounded widower beside his wife’s coffin and listens as he tries to explain a despair he cannot explain to himself.
A gravely ill soldier sails home from the Far East, sustained by memories of snow, family, and a village impossibly far away.
A wet graveyard walk leads to an actor drinking beside the neglected grave of the man who shaped and ruined his life.
A bitter coffin maker counts every human experience as a financial loss until illness at home forces a different reckoning.
A widow’s annual temperance luncheon drives her respectable guests to increasingly elaborate errands.
A gifted speechmaker is hired to honor a dead civil servant, but his polished tribute proves more reusable than anyone expected.
At his daughter’s requiem, a proud village shopkeeper tries to reconcile religious judgment with the child he barely knew.
After the thaw, a peasant brings his wife’s body down from the mountains—and the villagers reveal the grotesque ritual he performed while waiting.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
When a timid civil servant’s elderly mother is declared dead, grief soon competes with inheritance, office protocol, and his wife’s practical schemes.
When a fisherman’s arm is trapped in a trawling cable, his captain brother must choose between saving him and saving an expensive net.
A dying Norman farmer entrusts his son with an address, a secret household, and an obligation no legal will records.
After burying a man celebrated for his honesty, his children open a private confession that forces them to choose between truth and family honor.
An Indian prince’s cremation beneath the cliffs of Étretat confronts a French resort town with an unfamiliar rite.
A pious aristocratic family races to secure a freethinking marquis's last rites before scandal can reach the newspapers.
A farming couple schedule a funeral around the colza crop, but the dying old man refuses to cooperate with their practical plans.
After burying his young wife, a colonel returns home to a letter in which she explains the hidden coercion behind her death.
A respected lawyer accused of violating his lover’s grave refuses counsel and asks a shocked courtroom to hear why he returned to her.
A boy waits for news of an ailing priest and struggles to understand the adults’ uneasy silences.
21 stories
