After a chance encounter with a mysterious teenage girl, a lonely woman gets pulled into the girl's sinister family drama.

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.

When a young boy witnesses an odd event from the window of his small-town house, he begins to doubt the stability of the world around him.

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 man develops a deep interest in the author of a children's book he reads to his daughters. Ignoring his wife's confusion and mild disapproval, he goes to visit the author's old house and takes his daughters with him.

A five-year-old girl and her mother go into hiding with some less-than-savory friends at an upstate New York cabin. While there, the girl sees the ghosts of a past tragedy and, for the first time, confronts the insecurity and inexplicability of her own life.

A driver in West Virginia suddenly encounters an older man standing in the middle of the road and agrees to take him to his destination. Though the driver judges the man for his weary appearance, the older man reveals to the driver his life's regrets.

A young woman recounts three times in her life when she felt emotions of an unexplainable transcendent love: watching a ballet for the first time, making eye contact with an attractive librarian in high school, and listening to an old professor lecture during night classes at a university.

Stuck with a broken engine in the middle of icy cold weather, a traveler goes to a nearby farm to seek help. He comes across a boy with a greater problem than his own, and changes his plans to help out the boy and his sick grandfather.

A graduate student at Columbia begins working as a research assistant to an eccentric older man, later discovering that they are looking into the life of a girl who was murdered.