The stories include (in the order they appear in the book):
Part One
- Curly Red: A girl nicknamed "Curly Red" reveals a secret in her family that concerns a racist crime.
- In Hiding: A poet responds to a black man's letters of his own works.
- I'm Not Your Son, I Am No One You Know: A man and his brother visits their demented father in a nursing home.
- Aiding and Abetting
- Fugitive
- Me & Wolfie: A boy and his young mother travels around and the boy tells of their lives.
- The Girl with the Blackened Eye: A 15-year-old girl is forcibly abducted and held hostage for several days in the hands of a serial rapist and killer.
Part Two
- Cumberland Breakdown: After a fire kills their father and their mother becomes reclusive, a girl and her brother go and find the house of the family who started the fire.
- Upholstery: A woman, travelling back to her hometown after she became an adult, reminisces on how she, as a girl, was attracted to an adult man who works in an upholstery shop, had a frightful evening that almost resulted in horrible havoc.
- Wolf's Head Lake
- Happiness
- Fire: A woman and her brother visits a neighborhood after their doctor father was killed in a fire in his house.
- The Instructor: A woman, who takes up an evening teaching position in a college, encounters someone unusual.
Part Three
- The Skull: A Love Story
- The Deaths: An Elegy: After being separated for many years after their parents' deaths, a woman and her brother meet again and visit the site where their father allegedly hacked their mother to death. The end of the story hints one might kill the other, how history might just repeats itself.
- Jorie (& Jamie): A Desposition: In a dysfunctional family, a girl tells the story of how her manipulative twin who slyly hurts her and her brother.
- Mrs. Halifax and Rickie Swann: A Ballad: When a teacher sees a boy in her high school class, they begin an adulterous relationship.
Part Four
- Three Girls: Two girls, after seeing Marilyn Monroe shopping for books in a second-hand bookshop, decide to protect her by not revealing her presence.
- The Mutants: Although it is not directly said in the story, it is presumed that the story is about the 9/11 attacks. A young woman, after experiencing the attack from faraway, ran up to her apartment, and became something else, stronger.
Acknowledgments
