To earn enough money for college, a high school graduate takes a grueling factory job. He expects his only takeaway from the work to be a paycheck, but a mysterious coworker teaches him about the world and his place in it.

After a terrifying illness, an Indian grandmother drops everything and moves to live with her son and his wife in California. What she finds is a family that has begun to leave behind the traditions she cherishes, and her desperate attempts to save them only intensify her suffering.

In a futuristic society in which humans can swap out bodies as they please, a woman's son lies critically injured in a hospital after an accident. As they attend to him, she reflects on the ways society has changed and strained her familial relationships.

A scientist travels across North America in search of a rare beetle, collecting stories along the way.

In modern-day China, a cohort of wasps skilled in cartography establishes a new colony, exercising their suppressive rule over a local beehive. One anarchist bee makes inroads into the wasp colony, setting in motion a subversion of the wasp monarchy and a new, pioneering generation of anarchist bees.

A young boy at a fishing pond finds himself in a predicament when, as he witnesses two adults having sex, the tree branch he's sitting on gives way. The boy's telling of the story becomes a legend for his small town in Kentucky.