The Starlight Express

A terminally ill woman leaves her husband, drives into the flatlands, and runs out of gas at a closed filling station called The Starlight Express — where she's taken in among the old and the dying and learns the rituals of a burial man's route. The full novella told by the author, read in one sitting. Spare, strange, and image-driven — bread and water left on porches, graves dug and filled, a house set alight at its owner's last wish — it's less a story about dying than about tending the dying and being quietly folded in among them. Best heard somewhere quiet, in the dark.