A young boy tries to figure out why his father wakes up in the middle of the night to sit in their dark kitchen, alone with his thoughts.

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.”

In post-World War II Japan, a boy is raised by his frigid father without love and spends the rest of his life endlessly pursuing it.

One night while visiting his mother, a man contends with the nature of faith and family.

The impact of an absent father emerges in the gruesome stories of a young daughter as her alcoholic mother listens and reflects on the struggles of raising her alone.

In a futuristic Kenya, a couple desperate for a son receives the customary 'installation' from the government, but the boy they receive is not what they expected.

After spending his adult life under the shadow of his father, a former NSA whistleblower, a man comes to terms with his complicated family history and what he wants for his own future.

After he loses his mother, a father feels unmoored and lashes out at his family as the winter solstice arrives.

In the late 20th century, an aging couple's daughter returns to live with her parents in an attempt to flee her failing marriage. While the mother easily slips back into her maternal role, the arthritic father struggles to empathize with his youngest child, and, in his increasing frustration, commits an unforgivable act that isolates him from his family.

A woman struggles with shaky faith and emotional isolation from her son, which intensify when she goes to see him in prison. After one particularly difficult visit, she faces her fears with her brother’s help.