As she walks alongside the Hudson River with her friend, a woman excitedly explains her intricate vision of what would give her happiness.

A slice of grim parts of life

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 man suddenly realizes that he hates his wife, and resolves to free himself.

If two sisters are born to a family, they will be competitive for life.

After witnessing someone die, an egoistical man tries to live life more fully, only to be reminded by his sister that he hasn't really changed his selfish ways, and that everyone secretly dislikes him.

A man thinks about his relationship with his parents (especially his mother) as he watches them grow old. He then realizes that he is now old too.

When his deceased son is accused of thievery, a grieving grocery store owner condemns the world for making him rethink the innocent memories he had of his son.

Following his breakup, a Japanese college student uses savings from his relationship as a means to quit his summer mowing job, but not without first helping a woman who asks, but doesn't appear to need, for her lawn to be mowed.

In a dystopian world, a student begins to spiral after he becomes dependent on the drug called "Good" that everyone is injected with daily. Faced with the cruelty of his family and friends, he befriends a strange girl whose family rejects the new societal mechanisms —which may be just what he needs.