Rats Live on no Evil Star

A retired skater is driven by guilt over her husband's death to return to the village where she was raised, lacking the will to live any longer.

But oblivion will not take her; she begins hearing stories whispered to her from walls and floors - from boards of funguswood, taken from a species of trees long since rendered extinct by humanity. A shill on death row somehow escapes prison by way of an old Leadbelly song; or perhaps it is a drug-induced madness.

He comes to the same village and spies on the skater, out on the Suicide Flats nearby, talking for hours with something that looks like tumbleweed. A tree, either the last or the first of its species, who is curiously familiar with Shakespeare, Blake, and Milton, and who bears humanity no ill will, is looking for a savior.