Following a messy breakup, an MIT graduate and a PhD student at Indiana University separately talk about the problems in their former relationship in two spliced-together conversations, exploring conflicts surrounding language, intimacy, commitment, and intellectualism.

A man and a woman converse the morning after a storm.

In Michigan, a recently divorced professor reflects on what it means to exist, first alone in his empty apartment and then alongside his student in a mission to find a missing girl.

In an increasingly inappropriate recorded message to a customer, a department store clerk compares their product complaint to kangaroos he saw at the local zoo.

A woman has an affair with a female lover who works in retouching models and imagines retouching the woman's face and body. The lover carries multiple selves inside of her, one of them a muscular, furry, aggressive man whose body hers (the lover's) sometimes resembles in bed.

A writing critic reviews the construction of Charles Chesnutt’s stories and how to write surfiction.

A family’s plans for the first day of the hunting season are delayed when the reason behind one son and his wife’s separation is revealed.

In California, a young woman reflects on her relationship to her father while working on a novel. Through reading her father’s novel, she understands their relationship through his eyes.

A man wholeheartedly agrees with a columnist in a recent paper about creating an amendment to abolish same-sex marriage, however, he takes it one step further: he suggest they also abolish "samish-sex" relationships, wherein overly feminine men date overly masculine women.

After two neighboring men’s wives leave them, they go on a fishing trip in the Bogs. The trip takes a turn for the worst with bad weather and the presence of an unwanted fisherman.