Compiling notes for an English essay, a sixteen-year-old girl recounts her middle-class upbringing, kleptomania, and eventual coercion into prostitution and assisting with drug use. After she suffers violence and abuse, she is eventually rescued — but the experience traumatizes her.

After a revolution, disabled peoples have been captured and banished to a new planet. When they receive a message from Earth, the exiled peoples believe they are in great danger and must decide whether to stay in the society they have established or journey to the other side of the planet to escape.

A woman dealing with conflicting emotions resorts to deliberately putting herself in danger to learn to value the life she's been given - but these unorthodox methods leave her more desperate than ever.

An overly sympathetic woman never allows herself room for hatred— even as her suffocating boss stalks and harasses her.

Four women bending together after a traumatic experience

An ill man and disabled woman, both caught up in the business of a vicious mobster, reveal what had happened to them in the same cafe.

Susan's slow poisoning of her abusive husband starts to feel more immoral to her brother as he befriends the broken man. When is the murder of an abusive husband not okay? As Susan slowing poisons Frank to death, her brother comes to understand how the broken man came to be. Susan's slow poisoning of her abusive husband starts to feel more immoral to her brother as he learns about the man's tragic character.

A grown woman reflects on an intense childhood friendship that drew to a close for no apparent reason. Summoned to the childhood friend's death bed and sent to fetch a priest so the old friend can confess, the woman is forced to reflect on the terrible secret - the murder of a disabled girl - that drove the pair apart.

A recently widowed woman lets a man into her house to look at her fuse box — but soon realizes that the man did not come for the fuse box at all.

A barista in a small Massachusetts town with a cynical outlook on vulnerability and love finds herself moved to reconsider the possibility of romance with her manager after she and her co-workers stay up late dancing with two clients, a quadriplegic man and his personal assistant, and sharing stories.