After spending his adult life under the shadow of his father, a former NSA whistleblower, a man comes to terms with his complicated family history and what he wants for his own future.

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.

After their only child dies during his gap year abroad, a woman reflects on her relationship with her husband and comes to understand that they deal with fear and grief in different ways.

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.

Amongst problems with her ungrateful children and ex-husband, a middle-aged mother deals with a burgeoning mid-life crisis — until she realizes that she has become miraculously pregnant.

A college counselor watches anxiously as her teenage son applies to college without her help. As her son plans for his future, the counselor and her husband reflect on how quickly their lives have changed, seeking ways to steady themselves in the midst of middle age.

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.

A couple with a rocky marriage argues over fetching a newspaper, which becomes a catalyst for their impending divorce. When they unexpectedly reunite over a decade later, the former couple witnesses how their lives disparately transformed thanks to the fateful newspaper.

A father tells his twenty-year-old son how he was married suddenly to his son's mother at a young age.

A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.