Here are the lives of rural people struggling to make sense of the isolated and often intensely religious worlds in which they live. Marie, a young wife and mother, recalls the effects of a statutory rape trial on her small community. Stuart, a devout teenage boy, dares to rename himself "Start," the only significant thing he has ever done without first consulting God.

Widowed Eliza discovers her husband's ghost in the bathroom, flipping through pages of the Popular Mechanics magazines she had thrown out after his death.