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 sixty-year-old ex-missionary takes an emotional pilgrimage to her first home in India and makes a new friend along the way.

In the far future, a selfless woman helps a wary man flee from a destroyed Earth to the world beyond the solar system.

A white Peace Corps volunteer talks with a Cameroonian passenger in a ship bar on a voyage from Africa to Europe about tensions between white and Black people on the European and African continents. What starts out as a small disagreement grows into a shocking interaction that leaves the volunteer unsure of his future.

As an American man returns to his ancestral home in New Hampshire, he imagines how he might have spent the last three years if he had traveled the world and become a Latin American revolutionary.

After a revolution, disabled peoples have been captured and banished to a new planet. When they receive a message from Earth, the exiled peoples believe they are in great danger and must decide whether to stay in the society they have established or journey to the other side of the planet to escape.

After her father kills himself, a young girl runs away with a traveling, unhoused stranger she meets at the bus stop. The two scrape and save for a life together until one day, she wakes up and he's gone. After looking for him in the cold, surviving an assault, and accepting help from a stranger, the girl realizes he's betrayed her, taking their savings and leaving. The next year, she gives birth to their child.

A Scottish Foreign Scholar tries to help the beggars he encounters at his university in India, but finds his outlook on life greatly changed by the sincerity of those he once looked down upon.

A mysterious man able to travel through time and space on a whim has a simple job: he must do one good deed every day. What exactly a "good deed" is, however, remains unclear; the bolder his interference becomes, the less sure he is that he's leaving the world better off.

In a dystopian American Midwest, a young Arab-American woman tries to get in touch with a past lover as she journeys through the Dakotas with her dying mother who's a part of "the Movement," a philosophy based on continuous transience and the avoidance of violent places.