A tenant couple cares for a handful of quails, despite the concern that their landlords next door have for their garden. When winter comes, the quails have disappeared, leaving the couple to hope they will return in the spring.

An amateur innkeeper struggles to demonstrate her knowledge of urban sophistication to her important guests and fails to grasp the benefits of authenticity to one’s heritage, leading to her mother being better-received by the guests.

An old lady takes her friend to her mother’s house for a meal, but when they arrive, things aren’t exactly as she remembers.

A Confederate family experiences financial struggles during the war. Just before the father leaves to join the fight, a group of Union soliders invade their home.

In the rural south, a sharecropper is terrorized by spirits after she and her family move into an abandoned plantation once inhabited by wealthy, classist elites.

When a man shoots an owl that has been taking his chickens and the owl does not die, the man decides to keep the animal alive and let it suffer—only to be mocked and outsmarted by the bird.

A man does various jobs on a nearby farm owned by an old man as he struggles with problems with his wife. One night, the old man asks him to kill a skunk who has been eating his hens, and the hunt has unexpected consequences.

A starving man wandering the countryside finds solace in a young woman's cottage where she offers him food and rest. But when the young woman starts to behave as if the man is a threat, he must decide whether or not to live up to her fears.

In a small rural town in the 1930s, three friends — a farmer’s wife, a music teacher and adulteress, and a single huntswoman — drift away from one another as they grow older, choosing unexpected futures for themselves.

After he is kicked out of his house, a husband spends his days sleeping under a flowering pear tree in the front yard, his wife hatefully observing.