1. Every year, part of a boy’s body would split off from the rest and gain consciousness. They all stayed in touch. Right before the boy turned twenty, he was just a mouth. His teeth planned to go off on their own. So everybody got together to throw him a farewell party. 

2. A group of children enjoyed playing in a junkyard noted for its abundance of doors. The children invented dozens of games making creative use of the doors. To them, the doors were a source of joy and comfort in difficult times. However, the children fully understood that these doors opened into another world and that to step across the threshold, to put even a toe through, would mean disappearing from this reality. So they quietly and gladly obeyed the golden rule: we will not open the doors. Troublemakers came along and there were close calls, but nobody ever broke that rule.

3. Once there were three professors who came together to discuss a novel that a student of theirs had written. Each professor had concluded that the novel was a masterpiece. The first professor argued that the text was the next epic. According to him, it contained all of human intellectual history from the Odyssey to the Inferno to Ulysses. It had value both as a compendium of human historical thought and as a reimagining of the oldest form for the new era. The second professor said that the text was the last truly original aesthetic achievement. It exhausted all the possibilities of literature left to man to magnificent effect, which made it the last great work of man. The third professor believed that text contained indispensable moral insight. The philosophy the work articulated was on par with Plato in importance, as if the author had imagined Plato’s unwritten thought. The three professors argued their positions for several days but found they could not come to a conclusive reading of the text. To resolve their debate, they called upon the student who had written the work. When asked what he intended, the student responded that he had simply wanted to receive a good grade, and had attempted to pander to the tastes of his three professors. The professors protested. Surely, such greatness must have sprung from some deeper well. The student admitted that someone, a lover, had served as inspiration for much of the text. He had simple intentions, the student said, motivated by a simple desire. Unsatisfied by the student’s answer and preferring their own readings, the professors put the student to death and kept his answer a secret.

4. A baker kneading dough accidentally dropped half a loaf on the ground. Feeling abandoned and confused, the dough struck out on her own. At first she looked for work as an actress but could only find occasional gigs doing commercials. Then she went back to school to learn to bake. Yet even here she ran into problems. She had hoped to become a pastry chef, but the other students scorned her for being dough. As she walked dejectedly down the cobblestone road, a familiar, warm smell made her look up. The other half of the dough, covered in sweat, stood in front of her. He told her that, after she left their shared life at the bakery, he never stopped looking for her. Despite their reunion, they remained distant from one another and continued to struggle with tension and conflict because of the accident. Together, they decided to seek couples counseling. They went to a couple’s counselor who kneaded them back together.

5. Raf had a hard life. His eleven older brothers tormented him and his parents would not do anything about it. Early in the morning, his oldest brother would pop a balloon to wake him up. His next brother would pop a balloon to make him spill his cereal. The brother after that would a pop a balloon to embarrass him in front of his friends. All eleven of his brothers would spend their entire day waiting for a moment to startle Raf with a popped balloon. He couldn’t take it. For years, Raf collected the pieces of balloon left behind from his brothers’ pranks. He would sneak into the backyard to sew each fragment into something greater than its parts: a massive escape balloon made from fragments of popped balloons. One evening as Raf was sewing together eleven more pieces of balloon, he accidentally sewed himself into the balloon and popped.