A little girl acts out on purpose for the first time when she hacks her family's knives after her father told her not to.

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.

After a boy finds a dime on the ground, he buys a load of bread — only to have it stolen by his abusive uncle. The boy must decides if he wants to stand up against his uncle, or accept yet another loss.

The lives of a teenage girl in an abusive relationship, an elderly mother looking to make amends, and an unfaithful wife converge on an unexpected evening.

A little girl navigates her relationships with two boys in her elementary school class, a brash bully and a shy victim, and learns about the nature of suffering.

A boy at a boarding school writes a letter back to his mother. He fights back tears and must face another harassment from his bullies.

A seventh-grade English teacher copes with the recent death of her father and assigns a memoir that her students love reading. However, their parents question her for her pedagogical choices because of the swear words and provocative topics in the book.

A schoolmarm attempts to teach a group of men about justice, time, and irony in a repurposed saloon after they vote to have her hung for her disciplinarian ways.

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.

A young boy angry, about a conflict with his neighbor, discusses morality with his mother. With ironic consequences, they explore sin, God, and the presence of evil in the world through the lens of the Tooth Fairy.