When a young Black woman shows up at her crazy dead aunt's apartment in New York City with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, she finds none of the money she'd been hoping to inherit. Instead, in a hidden treasure chest, they discover a dead body, a shotgun, and a machete, sealed with a tempting offer from the Devil. The couple takes the deal and, hungry for blood, sets off to wreak havoc on the blue suits that have violently policed their communities for so long.

In a segregated America at the onset of World War II, strange, explosive “stumps”—formed out of spores and resembling wooden statues of the recently deceased—have begun to appear all over cities. To neutralize and remove these stumps, a new government agency has employed a group of singers whose unique vocal resonance can turn the stumps to dust. But when the only two Black female “exterminators” in Chicago—a God-fearing goody two-shoes and a brash blues singer—uncover the agency's corrupt secrets, they decide to stage a rebellion.

In this excerpt from a longer piece of work, multiple characters' lives intersect near an interplanetary brothel.

When a notebook full of top-secret designs is looted from a Brooklyn saloon, a Latino drummer and his inventor girlfriend must go on a quest to retrieve it from a rival Manhattan gang.

A Black, southern house servant with internalized racism, joins her mistress on a visit to another region, where she observes Black people acting with something she abhors: autonomy.

A teacher on the Lower East side meets a friendly man with a presence resembling a dead English poet.

In Iowa, a young Black man goes to a party where he meets a host of artist types who cause him to reflect on how people relate to each other.

In the near-future, people of color have been legally classified as infected, which has led to extreme systemic oppression. Two Black men risk everything to provide their community with a free library, but the police force threatens to shut them down.

In a society where dreams are taboo, one man who has recurring dreams tries to find a place where he will fit in. He attends a therapy group, but there is something eerie about this bunch of people and Solar soon disappears.

A Black couple vacationing in France implodes after facing countless microaggressions, taking their discontent out on one another.