When the Great Recession leaves a depressed college graduate without a promising job, she finds herself walking a quarter-million-dollar clone of the dog she used to take care of.

As a university professor acts as a sounding board for everyone else’s problems, her own stress mounts to a dangerous peak.

When a man moves in to a new home down the road from a strange couple, he finds himself audience to a sad and bitter series of events replete with bouts of poverty, marital drama, infidelity, and abandonment.

A man plays bridge on his night off with a few distant friends. Their conversation inspires a tipsy, failed attempt to steal from a drugstore. In this 20th century jail, his excitement turns to anger and doom as he reflects on his crumbling marriage, kids, and childhood.

A poor, ever-hopeful couple that imagines itself on the brink of a windfall suffers setback after setback, until the husband has a revelation about what in life holds real value.

A woman whose husband is out of work buys an expensive hat and hopes that her husband will let her keep it. But when her husband tells her to get rid of it, the woman obliges, all the while hoping she can buy it back.