A spurned lover presents an old flame with the stolen ashes of her late father in the hope of winning her back. An orderly in a '60s group home unintentionally creates a saint. Academic debate rages over the idiocy or ingeniousness of a possibly incompetent filmmaker's odd and rather dissatisfying opus. The common men and women that populate these pieces make it plain that even the most bizarre decisions and events make a perfect, though often invisible, sort of sense. These stories lay bare the fact that what may seem to some banal or boring is simply insufficiently explored--if one gets close enough, every single second of every single life reveals itself to be an intricate, singularly peculiar mess with depths that, plumbed properly, stretch back to the beginning of time.