In intense discussion a group leader ponders aloud, asking why hermits hide and what defines outcasts, among other cerebral queries. A group of friends discusses the oddities they have seen and perceived in their lives leather-clad hermits and criminal astronauts among them. They debate the purpose of hermitage, the classification of outcasts, and the purpose of their own reflections.

A lonely man in his forties imagines a domestic life with a woman he briefly met who is interested in his furniture, but not his marriage proposal.

A man's lonely life focused on the pursuit of reason and music leaves him questioning what more there may be in the lives of other people and of religion.

A lonely maiden is constantly reminded of her single status, working as an advertiser for a baby bed in New York. Seeking to make something of herself, she takes on both work and love with a passion, but only succeeds in one.

A man reflects on the loneliness of his childhood home, where his family would fervently clean the house every Saturday for guests on Sunday who would never show.

An older woman and self-proclaimed loner is forced to engage with others at her accounting job after she is pushed to socialize by her managers. This, as well as her invasive obsession with the young woman next door, leads her into uncomfortable self-reflection and new experiences.

When a mysterious new member joins a group of struggling authors, the friends discover that they may have a supernatural creature in their midst, who can grant a single author success above all the others—but at a cost.

After their band breaks up, a woman and her boyfriend take up an itinerant lifestyle in Idaho. As she wanders through the wilderness and the small farming town, a sense of the inevitable, of the unspeakable, begins to dawn on her: She contemplates murdering her own baby.

A city employs people to act strangely to order to make others feel normal.

A brief but ill-fated spark flares between an earth-roaming Spacer and a local frelk.