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.