In the far future, an alien civilization captures pacifist protesters and, as punishment, turns them into mind-controlled soldiers forced to commit violence. Will they be able to resist the effects of the mind-controlling drug and rebel?

An adult son is living with his parents when they begin to take stronger measures toward kicking him out. They’ve dropped him from the family phone plan, put a lock on the refrigerator, and now have put an official court-approved eviction notice on his door. His parents aren’t sure what went wrong with him. “He had every advantage. We loved him, we still love him, our only child, who came to us as the sweetest and truest blessing from God when I was forty-one and so empty inside…” The son doesn’t understand what his parents are thinking. How is he supposed to get a job without cell service or a car, which he doesn’t have anymore since his parents won’t loan him the money to take it to the shop? When his mom comes home from work, he storms out with the eviction notice in hand to yell at her, and she thinks about how he doesn’t even remember that it’s her birthday. He asks her, “You want me to die?” and she says, in her anger, “‘Yes,’” and then, “‘If you’re going to die, go ahead and do it—but do it someplace else, will you? Will you at least do that for us?’” She immediately says she doesn’t mean it but he’s already storming away. Now, the son is thinking about his own son, which he had on accident when he was a teenager. He’s not on great terms with the mother, and he thinks his mother resents that he’s made it hard for her to see her grandson. The son tries to find a lawyer to help him sue his parents for breach of contract, that “by virtue of their giving me my own room in the house since I was an infant and freely letting me move back in when I had no place else to go, they had entered into an unwritten contract to provide me with shelter, and that, even if it was within their rights to evict me, they at least had to give me six months’ notice, because you can’t just throw somebody out in the street, unless you’re in some country where they randomly kick down doors and put people in concentration camps.” He loses the case. After a lot of stalling, he moves out, and his son and the mother of his child move into his old room. His new apartment is less than ideal and so are the people he’s hanging around. He no longer talks to his father, but his mother puts him back on the family’s phone plan and now calls him every day. She mainly wants to talk about his son. She wants them to spend more time together. She sends him pictures his son drew in school: "fish in tanks, squirrels and dogs and cars, the usual sort of thing, except for one that said ‘Dad’ on it in big red bleeding letters and showed a kid’s face, his face, obscured by a swarm of floating misshapen blobs that I finally figured out were teardrops, as if he was sending me a message.” He figures his mother or the child’s mother put his son up to it. He thinks “the kid was no artist and you couldn’t really what [the blobs] were supposed to be.”

A space pilot ordered to annihilate a human colony contemplates sabotaging the mission, but the autopilot on the ship maintains the course.

Professor gives a talk about the human appetite for death

The Thirteen Mercies were given to Moses to rid the world of sin. But in a dystopian world, a group of soldiers used the powers of the Reversed Thirteen Mercies to commit war crimes. Now, imprisoned on a hostile jungle island, they await their judgement. The Thirteen Mercies, granted to mankind by God, promises to rid the humanity of sin. But in a dystopian world, a group of soldiers are imprisoned on a jungle island for using defiled spells of the Reversed Thirteen Mercies to commit war crimes.

Susan's slow poisoning of her abusive husband starts to feel more immoral to her brother as he befriends the broken man. When is the murder of an abusive husband not okay? As Susan slowing poisons Frank to death, her brother comes to understand how the broken man came to be. Susan's slow poisoning of her abusive husband starts to feel more immoral to her brother as he learns about the man's tragic character.

A woman dealing with conflicting emotions resorts to deliberately putting herself in danger to learn to value the life she's been given - but these unorthodox methods leave her more desperate than ever.

An unnamed narrator uses their own flesh and blood to cast evil spells and curses onto those who stand in their way. An unnamed narrator recounts the way they are able to cast spells by tearing off and consuming their own flesh and blood, and explains what has happened to those who have crossed them.

In discussing the altercations witnessed over the course of the day, Stephen Elwin and his family grapple with question of whether the downtrodden and those burdened by prejudice are nonetheless responsible for their own breeding and behavior. Elwin’s earnest and idealistic daughter Margaret valiantly defends their maid, who happens to be Black and also named Margaret, until she witnesses 'the other Margaret' breaking a piece of artwork.

When a bus is taken hostage, a woman comes to terms with her death.