In this satire, a cartographer discovers an isolated North African village in which the sole occupation is counting upward. Living in their utopia forces him to reckon with the utility of reason and the necessity of pain in human life.

A man picks up his grandmother-in-law from the airport and hears her say strange words as she drops and breaks her glasses, prompting her to remember the horrible loss of a fateful little pig during her childhood.

A daughter wakes up her mother to ask how much money she made from the dog races — but instead the mother distractedly dwells on her troubling encounters with men.

A witty high school student experiences daily name-calling, insults, and bullying by his peers. He resolves to defy everyone who undermines him by beating the high jump state record at his school's track meet.

During their discussion of philosophy and the downward spiral of the world’s condition, a group of men is startled by a voice in the dark that recounts for them two stories of the human embodiment of battlefield carnage. When the voice finishes, the men struggle to pinpoint where it came from.

In World War I era Britain, an Oxford University dean tells his colleague about the arm of war that stretched to his small English town and changed the life of the community stonemason. When the stonemason shares his idea for bringing down German planes, he doesn't expect to be so devastated by the death he causes.

When a couple go south to acquire an abandoned grape vineyard, and old man shares a cautionary tale about the vineyard’s past ties with voodoo magic and slavery.

An American vacationer aboard a train coming from Belgium meets a British man who shares his unbelievable story of how he secretly turned the tide of the first World War.

During a voyage to Bangkok, a captain sets out for a side-trip to a small island where a lone writer has isolated himself, crafting the work of his lifetime so he may regain the glory he once had and rejoin his beloved.