A father and his young son spend an evening watching for someone who doesn't want to be found. A highway worker scrapes dead animals off remote New Mexico roads and starts to wonder about the messes he has no way of cleaning up. A professional mourner is paid to weep for a stranger; an artist finds an unsettling new way to put more of himself into his work.

The fifteen stories in Human Noise range across different places and decades, but the people in them keep making the same mistakes. They keep secrets, say the wrong thing, or say nothing at all. Most are living with something they did or something they never got around to doing, longing for forgiveness or willing to settle for simply being understood.

The moments that count are the ones nobody else notices: a quiet kindness, a missed confession, a door left cracked open. In Human Noise, the small choices we make are monstrously large.