A young girl works to impress her highly critical parents and submits to a terrible fate as she struggles to meet their impossible standards.

A young woman attending a party with her obscure boyfriend is a witness to a dire cosmic event that thrusts her into a new, desolate existence.

After struggling to appeal to their state governor, a dysfunctional family anxiously awaits the public execution of a relative. As they wait at home new of the execution, tensions and strife erupt in a dispute over the relative's innocence.

A divorced 16 year old girl reflects on how the sexual trauma she experienced as a child perpetuates in her relationships with men throughout her life, forcing herself to grow up too early and leaving her starved for affection and love.

When a public defender living a dreary life walks in on his wife cheating on him, she apologizes to him by grazing his skull with a bullet and fleeing. Intent on finding her, the husband rescues a witch from an untimely death before the two join forces to decide his wife's fate.

When a writer and her old writing professor reconvene in a Mexican restaurant one final time before the professor's death, they experience a night of unwanted encounters and unnecessary criticism that leaves the writer with a bitter taste in her mouth.

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.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

A home invasion brings out the worst in a young boy.

When Harold's wife dies, seemingly by malicious cause, he becomes the prime suspect. As the public defender investigates her death, he finds that she may have held secrets herself.