A businessman covertly heads to the skating rink every day with a flailing routine, where he basks in the laughter of onlookers. Finally, he is forced to choose between his straitlaced family and his clownish — but authentic — alter ego.

Lying in the hospital, a soldier fights the pain and the memories of war while facing the decision to undergo a lobotomy.

A conversation with his former lover opens a man's eyes to his tendency to flee rather than confront the hopeless reality of his own life.

When a young man leaves his home in Kansas City to find a career, he struggles to settle down in one spot. He wanders, impoverished, across the western United States and finds a transcendent understanding of the human condition.

After a lawyer's wife leaves him, the lawyer returns home from work to learn from his son that there is an intruder in their home.

After a dangerous encounter with a predatory artist in the 1980s, a former artist-turned-housewife tries to imbue her oblivious teenage daughter with that same fear of men that leaves her cold decades later.

After his car breaks down at the base of a steep hill, a man encounters a stranger and walks with him to the ranch at the top of the hill, both seeking to solve the mystery of why the stranger’s wife has been taking apart their ranch piece by piece.

A white woman who has recently moved to a rural Southern area with her family experiences a hysterical fear of the neighboring Mexican children.

In 1920s Boston, two lower-class boys, one Jewish and one Catholic, work together at a corner store. Despite their religious differences and difficult upbringings, they form an unbreakable bond.

A group of overbearing Christian women in a small Southern town attempt to take care of and protect a mentally disabled young girl by sending her to an institution. Their plan shifts when the young girl receives a marriage proposal.