After a drunk college boy falls off a balcony, a slew of characters--a groundskeeper, another student, a chaplain, and an RA--relate to his death in different ways. Their stories are sidelined for the core matter: that a boy died.

In the days after his wife dies, an older man must confront his newly solitary life, both the good and the bad.

An academic who is dying from breast cancer and high on morphine reflects on her sense of failure in her lifelong pursuit of artistic brilliance. She decides her failing body has become her great work of art.

After a stroke, an elderly man survives with only his vision and religious faith fully intact. He struggles to survive in a world that can no longer understand or communicate with him.

Gloria, a young woman with a fatal cancer, visits her eccentric friend and her equally strange daughter, but her plans are thrown off course when the daughter asks Gloria to kidnap her.

While comatose, a sixty-five-year old man reflects on his past love for a city called Williamstown as his grown children discuss his terminal illness.

In an unlikely encounter, a homeless teenage boy recounts harsh events of his life to a writer. He nonchalantly tells of an employer whose assignments caused him to have permanent physical and mental damage.

Having been hospitalized for a long time, a young girl finds herself surrounded by people who cannot understand the strangeness of her illness. After her friend visits her, she must accept that her relationships may never be the same, and that her expectations that tether her to a life outside of the hospital may be very different from the disappointing reality.

When a young girl in a contemporary northwestern American town dies, one of her neighbors and former friends rethinks her relationship with death.

A young news reporter writes about a peculiar man in his mid-50s who is impoverished and suffers from a chronic illness — but when the man is accused of lying, the news reporter must decide whether to continue reporting the ill man's story or to accept that his claims are false.