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 couple adopts a troubled six year old child who takes a startling interest in one very precious item in their home.

A businessman receives a note from his wife’s father, asking for them to meet. Against the wishes of his daughter, the father agrees to give the businessman’s children a trust for $70,000.

A child chained in a cellar abused by their enraged parents decides to take matters into their own hands.

Thirteen-year-old Angelle gets into a car accident when her drunken father begs her to drive home in his stead. Later, she must take the witness stand in court and decide her family's future with her testimony.

A girl and her mother butt heads when the girl, after her surgery, wants to keep her amputated leg.

In a dystopian future where children are rare and valuable, a young woman deemed unfit to give birth by the government steals a baby in hopes of liberating both the child and herself.

After a tumultuous and difficult upbringing, a woman contemplates whether or not she should give up her newborn child for adoption.

A complex web of human relationships is presented in the form of an algebraic expression.

Amidst an outbreak of child abductions across the country, two new parents with toddler twins grapple with growing paranoia and keeping their young boys safe, which begins to put a strain on their evolving marriage.