While preparing his mother's birthday present, a young boy realizes he has lost her special pruning knife and laments that he has ruined her day.

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.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

A man reflects on his complicated summers with his father.

A young teenage boy calls his sister to pick him up from a house where a group of other boys are watching a disturbing and violent porn film. When the siblings hit and kill a deer on their way home, his sister attempts to deliver the deer's baby by cutting it open. The boy reflects on the other boys' inclination toward violence, the strict rules their father sets for his sister, and his own capacity to cut into flesh.

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.

Two years after the death of her mother, a knife saleswoman in New York City struggles to process her grief until one of her customers offers to help her in an unconventional way.

A little girl acts out on purpose for the first time when she hacks her family's knives after her father told her not to.

A father contemplates whether he should kiss his son on the lips when saying good night.

In an attempt to impress his emotionally distant father, a boy ridicules his mother, who has loved him unconditionally even in his father's absence. Wracked with guilt, he yearns for her forgiveness - only to find that she does not hold it against him.