After an odd revelation about life, a young man tries to prove himself to the woman he loves despite her love for another man.

Josiah Cole writes fruitlessly to his John, entreating him to return from the fringe religious sect he has joined.

A husband signs up to have his wife's eyes inserted after her death, only to find that the world from her perspective is unbearable to him.

In a futuristic world where the outdoors is clouded in an impenetrable darkness, a group of school children learn about mathematically engineered images that kill those who look upon them. They discover the strange darkness is due to biochips in their brains, designed to protect them from terrorist displays of these images.

On his sixth birthday, a young boy receives a surprise present that forever changes his perspective on life.

When a middle-aged woman finds out that her deceased father, a prominent New York justice in the early 20th century, was cuckolded by her mother, the daughter reevaluates her father’s far-reaching influence on her life.

While caring for his wife in the hospital, Dickstein contemplates the legacy of his late father, the probability of his wife's future widowhood, and other familial queries brought to the surface in his wife's Freudian summer course.