Vignettes of a number of relationships, most of them troubled, are glimpsed through the descriptions of creatures in this bestiary of the imaginary.

On a cold Seattle night, deep in the heart of winter, a woman walks into a bar and finds the beautiful and animal-like woman she has been waiting for. She chases the woman into the night and finds the stranger is not what she seems—but neither is the protagonist.

Eager to get his children to stop fighting, a father tells them a story about dragons and kings; things take a disappointing turn when the children realize that their father doesn't know the end of his own story.

An elderly Egyptian servant tells the allegorical story of the white-footed gazelle, a series of vignettes tethered together by shared characters and themes. When finished, the servant suggests that beasts are not confined to fairy tales and also exist, in the form of common people, in everyday life.

A teenage girl befriends a solitary bookworm who summers in her lakeside town, hoping he can help her learn about a lake monster she believes she saw. Over the course of a few summers, the two fall in love. The girl eventually learns the boy is the lake monster, granted human form for three months of the year.

A young girl befriends a city boy one summer and introduces him to her world of Swamp Apes, fairies, and her pet gator Dragon.

Asked by his therapist to tell a fable, a man recounts his unenchanting life as a lawyer married to a depressed, drug-abusing woman, with a disabled son he's struggling to raise. By filling his unremarkable story with sorceresses, magic, and true love, he attempts to romanticize a life he's desperate to escape.

In a world populated by monsters of various shapes and sizes, a small monster escapes from its hungry parent only to be feasted upon by other predatory creatures. When the small monster meets a friend that teaches it about the transformative power of art, it gives the monster confidence to finally fight back.

A middle aged man becomes the talk of the town when he shares a crazy story regarding his missing friend and creatures that live beneath a water pump house.

A woman tells a story about a fox who, to great consequences, raises a human child.