A mobster from an ex-Soviet republic runs his crew from the cover of a pickle factory on the outskirts of town. A renowned food critic, who has come unannounced to sample the pickles, gets caught in the middle of a gunfight with a rival crew. The mobster, not knowing what to say, explains to the critic that it was a rival pickle factory. The critic indignantly lectures him on the nature of capitalism and fair competition. Nevertheless he finds the pickles, which the crew had never paid much attention to, to be excellent. A stellar review lures adventurous out-of-towners to make pickle visits. Soon, they want pickle sandwiches, pickle recipes, the secrets of pickle-making. All this damned attention makes it difficult for him to run his business, which is prostitution. Meanwhile, his police snitch tells him someone is trying to frame him by leaving his pickles at crime scenes around town. The police are closing in on him, and the only way he'll escape the heat is find the true culprit himself. He calls in favors and leverages the combined forces of the mob. Their surveillance network is powerful, unmatched. They catch their man luring an underfed prostitute into a bakery: it was the critic! As he is dragged away by two goonish mobsters to some unsavory end, he explains: That small first taste of blood at the gunfight that day was all he needed to awaken some primal appetite for murder. The pickles were a mnemonic. Their briny crisp flavor keenly evokes his virginal excitement, bringing alive that depth of pleasure he did not know he could feel.

A mother is dissatisfied with her two artistically-tempered and insufficiently aggressive sons. So she decides to import two others from an impoverished ex-Soviet republic where most of the men can be counted upon to be aggressive in her favored way. Almost immediately, they set up a nice little side job selling arms from the home. She is so pleased by this display of cunning and aggression that she threatens her actual children with disinheritance. The two actual children abscond, realizing their parents are no longer in their right minds. It is not long before the adopted children are selling other things, and women are entering and exiting the home at all hours. One of the sons does research on the two men and learns both that their ten years older than they claim to be and they are connected to the Russian mob. They try to intervene, but before they can, the FBI has smashed down the door and confiscated the house under RICO laws. The parents are left homeless.

The brutal dictator of a third-world country is lonely. He commissions all his ministers to scour the pages of MySpace for a woman to abduct. He has a weakness -- "A weakness!", he repeats emphatically -- for intellectual women with chestnut hair. A candidate is brought to him, and he signs off on the plan, practically slobbering over her page. For the next few weeks, he can think of nothing besides listless post-coital murmurings of Kropotkin and Godwin. His agents abduct her in an ethnic grocery and whisk her overseas to his fortressed fiefdom. She is brought, still drugged, to his bed. He snuggles up beside her. She is no more than a flop of hair on the pillow beside him. He turns her over and recognizes her instantly: a notorious Israeli secret agent, a killing machine. She looks so different without the glasses. He panics. She will kill him before the sun rises: this he knows. His charm kicks in. If there were some story he could tell her, some puzzle, or some tale to keep her mind off killing for another night...

A political activist is so disgusted by her country that she tries to forget her native tongue. She stares at the letters on the spines of books, trying to forget what words they spell out or, rather, that they even spell anything at all. She searches for a language that has many synonyms for expressing the concept of 'peace'. Researching this at the library, she meets and falls in love with the scion of a family infamous for having led purges in Maoist China. He coos into her ear that if that was not his family, it would've been some other. But her loss of language is so far gone that she can no longer make out what he said.

A person is told that if he smiles, he'll feel better. He doesn't believe this crap, and he becomes suspicious of the person who said it to him. He begins prying into her life to look for evidence that she's really a robot. Or a soulless alien. He installs sensors in her apartment to listen for oil changes or strange squeaking binary languages. One day, she spots him downloading the recorded data from the local WiFi hub. Naturally, she calls the police. As they are dragging him away, he looks back at her, her eyeballs a cool flickering red. Her head flies open and a giant satellite dish flies out, transmitting a visible beam to the sky. No matter what he does, he cannot induce the policemen to turn around.

A man and a woman wager $1,000 on who will marry first. The woman says that her consolation, if she wins the money, will be shoes. The man says that his consolation, if he wins the bet, will be to pile the money in a heavy lump on his bed and sleep with it. Time passes, and they lose touch and grow apart. Years later, on the day of her wedding, he shows up -- a wretch -- demanding his money. The groom and groomsmen make short work of him in his pitiable and decrepit state. He lies in a bloody heap by the church. The sun feels good. Some time later, he feels a plop on his chest. The indignant bride has pawned some of her wedding presents so as not to give him the satisfaction that she finked on the bet. He clutches the sack of money, smiling, squinting in the sunlight.

A husband, after several years of marriage, is a grave disappointment to his wife. He is a diminutive man and says things like "The new day will bring new humiliations". His wife takes on the physically largest person she can find as a lover. The lover -- with an eye on the childless couple's fortune -- asks if he can be adopted, and the wife is gaga over the idea. Sympathetic to his wife's recent unhappiness, the man accepts. The lover moves in, and soon the husband corrupts the physically large person with his artistic nature. One morning, at breakfast, the lover expresses himself with language reminiscent of the husband's, and the wife slaps her young lover across the face. Beside herself with frustration, she walks out on both men.

A middle-aged man, with thinning hair and a growing paunch, has spent his entire life compiling a book titled: Shit! What Do I Say? The book is an exhaustive compendium of the things people might say to you, paired with your ideal response. He delights audiences, as he responds to the probings of interviewers solely by referencing the book. He takes the book with him everywhere he goes and finds it difficult, after so many years of laborious effort, to speak outside its context. He meets one of his fans, a linguist studying discourse analysis, and they fall in love. But the book seems to be leading him, with its sinister answers to her innocuous questions, to break off the relationship. She leaves him, and the book seems satisfied. In a fit of rage, he pitches the book into the flames. But she is already gone, and he cannot find the words to call her back.