"Sticks" (1995)
There is a very tall pole in the front yard of the family home. Dad decorates it each holiday choosing a different kind of decoration as a theme for each celebration. His child reminisces about this and remembers how the pole eventually came to represent his father's declining mental state; after the death of his wife, he gradually descends into madness, and decorates the pole in more and more eccentric ways.
"Exhortation" (2000)
Todd is that manager of the team in Room Six. This is a mysterious little band of men whose work is very mysterious. Todd likes a happy workplace and he tries to encourage a positive mental attitude amongst his staff. Their mysterious job is never stated by the author; it is the job of the reader to rise to his challenge and guess what they do.
"Puppy" (2007)
Maria and Callie are two women whose different lives both revolve around animals. Maria has a happy family whose life is full, whose home is messy, and whose world is filled with love. They adopt animals that nobody wants, and love them very much. By contrast, Callie's husband has a pet store and sells animals to people, but when they don't sell he kills them without a second thought. Because Callie is frightened to question her husband she turns a blind eye to this abhorrent behavior.
Callie's son, Bo, has a habit of running off, playing "chicken" amongst the cars on the interstate. To keep him safe, Callie chains him to a tree in the backyard as if he was a badly-treated dog. She thinks that she is doing the right thing because he hates being inside, preferring the outdoors.
When Callie tries to sell a puppy to her neighbor, Maria, Maria's kids fall immediately in love with it and want to take it home. Maria usually says yes to this kind of pleading, but before she buys the puppy catches sight of Bo chained to the tree in Callie's backyard. She decides not to purchase the puppy, ultimately condemning it; Callie leaves it outside in a field, where it later dies.
"Victory Lap" (2009)
Allison is a young girl who is kidnapped three days before her birthday. A boy who lives nearby witnesses the kidnapping; Kyle used to be friends with Allison, but when she became one of the popular crowd she sort of left him behind, and didn't really hang out with him anymore. Kyle's parents are very strict. He has a curfew and is not allowed out by himself, but he knows that he can help Allison if her tries to intervene. The story presents the reader with Kyle's dilemma as he decides between helping her and potentially saving her life, and prioritizing his own safety by pretending that he didn't see anything.
"Al Roosten" (2009)
Al Roosten feels disrespected in his small town. He owns an antique store, but it is not very successful. Al gets involved in a charity event, signing up to walk up and down a runway in costume in order to raise money. The winner is the person raising the most money. One of the other fundraisers is a man called Larry Donfrey. Larry is a realtor, and very successful. Al is jealous of Larry and the two men don't get along, but Al decides to create situations in his head in which he and Larry get involved in a scheme together and become good friends, bringing Al the respect of the townspeople that he feels he has deserved all along.
"Escape From Spiderhead" (2010)
Jeff is sent to what is considered to be an experimental prison where inmates are nothing more than guinea pigs for a pharmaceutical scientist called Ray Abnesti, who creates new pharmaceutical treatments. Abnesti is carrying out an experiment to determine how strong love is. He puts Jeff into a room with a woman named Heather. They don't know each other, and are not particularly attracted to each other, but after they take a drug that Abnesti is developing they suddenly fall madly in love and have sex. As soon as the drug stops being administered they lose all feeling for each other. Abnesti repeats the experiment, substituting a woman named Rachel for Heather. The following day, Abnesti lines Heather and Rachel up in front of Jeff and asks him to choose which of them should be given a drug called Darkenfloxx. This is a horrible drug that causes mental and physical pain. Jeff doesn't want either of them to get hurt but doesn't feel able to choose which one should be given the drug - his feelings for both women are equal.
Abnesti seems to have proved a point about love and feelings to himself and chooses not to give the drug to either of the women. Later, he and another man are locked into a room together. Jeff realizes that this other man also had sex with Heather and Rachel and that the women are being faced with the same dilemma Abnesti presented him with earlier. The women are just as unable to choose between the men as Jeff had been to choose between them and so the Darkenfloxx is never administered.
Abnesti takes his "love drug" to his superiors, wanting their permission to take his experiments a step further. He administers Darkenfloxx to Heather and forces Jeff to watch as she suffers, just to show that he genuinely has no romantic feelings towards her. However, the drug affects Heather so badly that she commits suicide. Abnesti threatens to give the drug to Rachel as well to see if Jeff has any kind of attachment to her. Jeff refuses to participate in any more experimentation, exclaiming that this drug should not be given to anyone. Abnesti goes to get a warrant that will force Jeff to do what he is told, but in his absence, Jeff takes Darkenfloxx himself and commits suicide whilst in its hold.
"Home" (2011)
Mikey is a soldier who is returning from war. He moves in with his mother, but finds that either the world has changed or he has, because everything seems different. He struggles to learn to adapt to his strange new world.
"My Chivalric Fiasco" (2011)
Don Murray, the boss at a Medieval theme park, rapes a park employee named Martha. Another employee, Ted, who is a janitor at the park, witnesses the rape. Martha is embarrassed and ashamed that she has been raped and Murray wants the whole incident swept under the carpet, and so both offer Ted a deal that will "incentivize" his continued silence. Ted is promoted from janitor to pacing guard. This new job entails taking a drug called KnightLyfe, which will cause him to take on the persona of a Medieval knight. It makes him naturally and over-abundantly chivalrous. This new-found level of chivalry also makes him want to save the maiden in distress - Martha - and he reports her rape to others at the park. When Murray learns that he has not kept his silence as promise, Ted is fired.
"Tenth of December" (2011)
An un-named cancer patient goest to the woods to kill himself, but meets a boy who teaches him more about himself than he ever knew before and changes the way in which he thinks about his decision to take his own life.
"The Semplica Girl Diaries" (2012)
Lilly is raised in a middle-class family by loving parents who will buy her anything to make her happy. Her father in particular likes to indulge her. He wants to "keep up with the Joneses" and purchases lavish gifts for Lilly, including Semplica Girls of her own. Semplica Girls are women who are trafficked from the third world and brought to the west to be used as human ornaments. Lilly loves the gift but her younger sister Eva is more sensitive than Lilly and her father; she frees the Semplica Girls, thereby committing a felony for doing so.
