At the beginning of Carnival in Port of Spain, a drunk woman meets a strange white man with a jewel in his chest and then wakes up in a mysterious place.

An eighteen-year-old kid's life is forever changed one night in New York City when he meets a legendary musician.

After her identical twin goes missing in a small, suburban town, a sixteen-year-old girl reflects on her parents' crumbling marriage and muddles through life without her other half.

In the far future, a Welsh woman temporarily moves to a space colony on a distant planet with her husband, Owen. The woman regals her space-born daughter with tales of the wonders of Earth, and her daughter develops a great longing for Earth that eventually puts her life at risk.

A schoolteacher at a newly desegregated Southern school agonizes over whether to turn a Black student in for the murder of a white boy in an alley fight, in order to prevent a white mob from murdering the student's friends and family. The Black student explains he didn't commit the murder and only acted in self-defense, but he insists on turning himself in to protect his neighborhood.

Al Roosten, a local business owner always second-best to his competitor, Larry Donfrey, contemplates returning to an anti-drug charity event to ensure that Donfrey is able to help his disabled daughter.

Multiple extramarital affairs come to a head years later, but the narrator circumvents them at the last moment.

A woman investigates her brother's suspicious death in Antarctica and dwells on his wife's mysterious disappearance years ago.

Cowan will do anything to get revenge on the man who killed his own child and drove Cowan's lover to suicide.

A famous poet wakes up in the afterlife but wishes to be alive, and death offers her a deal. If she kills a boy, she can live for 25 more years.