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.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

After struggling to appeal to their state governor, a dysfunctional family anxiously awaits the public execution of a relative. As they wait at home new of the execution, tensions and strife erupt in a dispute over the relative's innocence.

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.

Apollo is an ordinary kid at a party, a crime fighting justice-seeker, a victorious basketball player, a police officer doing his job, a scared boy running from a villain. His story begins again and again, and he's different every time — but every time, his story ends in the same, terrible way.

A teacher on the Lower East side meets a friendly man with a presence resembling a dead English poet.

As she wanders in and out of forests to escape her past and the boy she feels guilty for wanting, a woman gives birth to and abandons a child she thinks of as the physical embodiment of her sin.

Caught between two dimensions of spacetime, a poet shares stories with two women in need of his narrative insight, all the while meditating on the meaning of stories and the intricacies of interpersonal connection.

A progressive and bitter father going through a mid-life crisis goes on holiday to a water park with his wife and excitable son. He casually confronts racist and irritable guests while trying to figure out how to be a good dad.

The impact of an absent father emerges in the gruesome stories of a young daughter as her alcoholic mother listens and reflects on the struggles of raising her alone.