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.

In a small rural American town in the late 1800s, a woman's eldest son is accused of committing murder. She takes her younger children to watch him be executed, hoping they will not follow a similar path.

A boy spends the day singing around his sister, as he and his family watch her sink into a tar-pit as punishment for killing her husband. He toggles between the maturity and the child-like helplessness this jarring experience brings out in him.

In an alternate universe in 19th century Boston, a single mother commits an act of unnatural cruelty against her son. However, since women are invincible against a man's violence, the wife of an esteemed policeman takes on the task of executing her, only to have second thoughts in the cold gallows.

After a white sheriff's deputy arrests a Black man in 1968, a winter storm causes him to take refuge in a garage, and the two Black brothers who work there make the deputy question his position and his morals.

After being sentenced to death row, a man must seek help from his cellmates

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.