The Sixth Stage

Submitted By: Devin N Thomas

The Sixth Stage (Grief) is a psychological drama exploring the emotional fallout of loss and the seductive illusion of control. In this part of the anthology, Audi Coleman, a rising nurse with a complicated family history, is jolted back into her childhood home after the overdose death of her younger sister, Ailey. Struggling to connect with her grieving mother and emotionally burnt-out brother, Audi attempts to process her pain the only way she knows how: through action. She throws herself into addiction research, community care, and personal reinvention, emerging years later as a decorated practitioner and public figure. But not everything is as it seems. Beneath the accolades and clinical calm, Audi’s grief begins to express itself in increasingly unorthodox ways. Flashbacks collide with the present. Emotional ruptures play out like memories, until the audience, like Audi, begins to question what’s real. Told through nonlinear storytelling, fractured timelines, and layered family dynamics, The Sixth Stage interrogates the myth of the “strong one” in a grieving family, and how unaddressed trauma can fester into something quietly monstrous. It is a tense, emotionally rich meditation on grief, legacy, and the desperate ways we try to hold broken things together, and is designed to spark conversations about how we love, how we lose, and how we heal.