Lynnie is a young, working-class girl who works at the Stone House in town and wastes her days making stories about the lives of the people around her, which she tells to her friend, Isobel. But when rumors start to circulate, Isobel mysteriously moves away, and Lynnie is left wondering why.

A girl flees her home when her parents want to send her back to her abusive husband.

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.

A self-reliant but lonely woman becomes excited by the incidental visit of two boys in her apartment. When she unwisely lends them her long-buried trust and kindness, she quickly regrets it.

Fearing a lonely life in the company of her ailing husband, a woman begins an extramarital affair with her friend, but soon realizes that her worst nightmare might come true anyway.

When a woman finds her purse stolen, she retraces the steps of her eventful day only to realize that the encounters, and her life as a whole, are empty and purposeless.

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.

An aging electrical engineer's intensifying sensation of detachment culminates in a series of debilitating headaches. As he works through fatigue, setbacks, and pain, he finally confronts the source of his desolation.

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.

A young woman is returning to her husband and parents in New York, after having left her husband for a brief affair. As her father drives her home and reminisces on the hard work it took to build a life at their farmhouse, she learns that he hasn't told anyone else she's coming home.