Cooley has been invisible for five years. He knows which benches to sit on, and how people's eyes slide off the space where he is, and he's made a kind of peace with being a ghost in the shadow of the towers.

Then, on a road he had no business walking, he hears something moving in a vacant lot off Sugar Creek — and finds out what it costs to be the one person who stopped.

A short story set in a near-future Charlotte, where the ambulance doesn't come until somebody's account clears.

Written and read by Seth Ervin.

Exile

In the world outside, survival isn't salvation.

Two years after his family's farm fell, a boy and his hound survive alone in the mountains — foraging, hiding, and carrying the weight of everything that was lost getting out. Then something falls from the sky that shouldn't exist, and the world he's been hiding from comes looking for him.

A story about grief, faith, and what it costs to keep going when the people who taught you how are gone. Written and narrated by Seth Ervin.

Part of Strange Country — speculative fiction from the edge of the familiar. New stories monthly, every one narrated.

A trader works the floor of a market where memories are the only commodity that matters — bought, held, shorted, resold to anyone wired in. The job is a windfall. The apartment, the lover, the luck: all of it arrived at once, like a gift. A near-future story about gratitude as a product, and the long con of getting exactly what you want.