A man reflects on the past week while an unexpected storm rages outside, and he compares the events that follow with the fall of the Roman Empire.

In a small town, a resident watches as the people and place change. He recounts eight seemingly disparate stories, but the town connects them all.

Following his breakup, a Japanese college student uses savings from his relationship as a means to quit his summer mowing job, but not without first helping a woman who asks, but doesn't appear to need, for her lawn to be mowed.

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.

After a young man runs away and is said to be hiding in a canyon, his co-worker sets out to find him and ends up sharing his painful backstory of fear and lost opportunity.

A writer and his student are implicated in a rumor.

In a poignant reflection on the legacies of the past, a man finally hears from his grandmother the full account of his great-grandfather’s death at the hands of a close friend.

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.

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

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.