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.

On a cold winter's day, a doctor travels to the home of a deathly sick man who claims that his illness is actually a curse his wife cast on him.

While recovering from an illness, a little girl makes an enchanting discovery.

After finding out that her toddler has cancer, a fiction writer and her husband living in the American Midwest do everything they can to save their baby, including giving up her artistic integrity in order to pay for the medical bills.

A teacher in Washington tries to comfort one of his students—an orphan who is dying from a chronic disease—opting to be her guardian for the summer even in the face of her looming, imminent death.

In a town full of people with tuberculosis, the healthy young daughter of a nurse is teased by two wealthy but frail sisters. When she is caught lying about the cause of her father's death, the girl must figure out how to be proud of who she is.

During the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918, a young boy is left alone so his family can be treated in their town’s makeshift hospital. The boy tries his best to hold down the fort and prove his manhood, though the people around him make it more difficult than he expected.

A four-year-old black boy vaguely recalls a mixture of occurrences that puzzled him, including a sentenced hanging in his town of a man who allegedly murdered his wife.

Plagued by an aggressive case of pneumonia and haunted by a dying neighbor, a sanatorium patient is advised to have his ribs resectioned, thus sending him into a panicked reflection on the inevitability of death.

A young boy's stay in the hospital takes a dramatic turn when an unexpected patient arrives.