“Eight Letters” is a near-future speculative short story that follows an employee at a Canadian space tech company after a quiet corporate decision reshapes who is deemed worthy of survival. As humanitarian language and institutional restraint mask cost-saving measures that erases a public lottery for escape, the narrator confronts the sudden horrible intimacy of moral complicity, which is made visceral by a false emergency alert that, for one terrible moment, turns an abstract list of names into the irrevocably dead. Caught between paralysis and action, they are forced to reckon with the limits of ethical purity and the weight of choosing something over nothing.

“Again” is a speculative literary short story submitted to Grain that follows a man in the moments after his death, as he drifts through an afterlife shaped by memory, regret, and unfinished grief. Guided by the ghost of a childhood cat, he is drawn into a confrontation with his younger self and forced to witness the quiet shame that has followed him into adulthood.

Fallen Tree is a speculative fantasy short story that follows Avon, a young druid, in the immediate aftermath of the chosen hero’s death. As ritual, prophecy, and communal need threaten to erase the man he loved, Avon must navigate grief, anger, and abandonment in a world that teeters on silent oblivion. The story explores how destiny can hollow the people it elevates, and how love persists even as memory, faith, and certainty begin to decay.

After the Song follows Varro in the aftermath of victory as he reckons with what remains between former allies and enemies alike. The story explores how change reshapes identity, belief, and loyalty once certainty has fallen away, and the weight of expectation, guilt, and loss long after the battle is won.

Trapped in the day of his own death, Corrin only ever survives long enough to reach the end. When he finally lives long enough for night to fall, he discovery the things that has kept him alive is as beautiful as is it terrible.

As the world waits for the end, Elliot just wants to pay his rent, survive the week, and maybe fall in love before capitalism finally runs out of time.