A boy finds a mysterious caterpillar-like creature in the forest one day. He brings it home and kills it to add to his wildlife collection, but becomes haunted by creatures he can no longer control.

Vignettes of a number of relationships, most of them troubled, are glimpsed through the descriptions of creatures in this bestiary of the imaginary.

When a graduate student makes his way to Colorado with his recently unemployed girlfriend to visit his married friends, an alarming development in his friends’ marriage causes him to reevaluate his own relationship and, in the process, make a grave mistake.

Four teenage boys escape the Brooklyn summertime heat at their local swimming pool. After their swim, the boys are ravenous, and they imagine all the foods they'd like to eat.

A boy watches as his father takes up the sport of caterpillar racing. When the father's caterpillar faces a scheming and clever opponent, the father risks everything to beat him.

A weathered housewife finds her only purpose in caring for her mentally ill son whom she protects from her abusive husband. When police come around investigating a murder, she fears her husband may be responsible.

A father attempts to bond with his thirteen-year-old son, who recently came out to him, on a Florida spa trip. When the boy is heckled at a restaurant, the father struggles against succumbing to violent urges.

A mother and father argue over whether or not to allow fairies to punish their daughter who is mutilating innocent fairytale creatures.

In modern-day China, a cohort of wasps skilled in cartography establishes a new colony, exercising their suppressive rule over a local beehive. One anarchist bee makes inroads into the wasp colony, setting in motion a subversion of the wasp monarchy and a new, pioneering generation of anarchist bees.

When two sisters and their best friend befriend the new boys in their rural town, the girls' thoughts shift from make-believe to the realties of puberty.