An old man tells his nephew a story about how an incident involving a stolen lock eventually led to the creation of a town in 19th-century Mississippi.

Sitting at a New York City diner before a Broadway matinee, a middle-aged man bickers with his wife about cancer, step-sons, and lesbians until an eavesdropper's analysis of them allows him to see his life clearly for the first time in a long while.

A new addition to the English department at a university in Canada raises the eyebrows of the staff because of his apparent queerness, and as they strive to uncover his sexuality, their hypocrisy is satirically revealed.

In a Tucson, Arizona of the near future, an Asian American engineer races to salvage her prized creation, a stratosphere-orbiting balloon, before it can be hijacked to serve nefarious purposes.

After returning the I CAN SPEAK mask for babies, which plays and simulates sophisticated speech, a woman receives a lengthy letter from an overly-enthusiastic sales rep about the mask's ability to make babies more intelligent and loveable.

A story is on trial for falsely claiming to be science fiction in a satirical 1940’s London courtroom.

A Black mother enlists rootworkers to dole out revenge on a White woman whose merciless actions during the Great Depression caused her children to starve.

When a New York woman learns that her assistant’s husband cut his middle finger off during a fight, she can’t help but dwell on her assistant’s luck with men and her own inferiority.