A couple:
A stuntman, a makeup artist, & a stage magician start a detective agency
In the 70s, a radical disillusioned by the infiltration of the black power movement decides instead to study voodoo. She makes a deal with Papa Legba and Baron Samedi: go back in time to just after the emancipation proclaimation and ressurrect all deceased slaves as zombies to fight the confederates -- with their fighting power equivalent to the total labor enslaved africans have performed on north american soil. She becomes an important figure, courted by union officials, because (due to the increase in essentially-invulnerable-though-not-immortal manpower), she shortens the war substantially. She uses this position to make it clear that, if reconstruction is not managed in such a way that former slaves are given what they were promised, the powerful in the now-unified united states will be held responsible (by the armies of the living dead who are now defending black americans from groups like the KKK and Golden Circle) -- including the (now surviving) Lincoln. Although she cannot return to her own time, Legba shows her a vision of the 1970s in the timeline she has created: an advanced an equitable society, kept that way by the threat of the weight of history (and the massive remaining reserves of labor-power of former slaves).
A surgeon involved in cutting-edge life-extension research is killed in a hit-and-run, and his widow begins to have insomnia while grieving. She eventually starts a regimen of sleeping pills. She experiences increasing sonombalism and vivid nightmares, but is afraid that if she stops the sleeping pills, she won't sleep at all. Eventually, as a result of putting together clues, she goes into the basement, and finds that she has, in her sleep, created a remarkably lifelike replica of her late husband out of animal carcasses. The replica opens its eyes, turns to her, and says "I'm home".
In an anarcho-communist far future, a celebrity space janitor, famed for the craft and passion with which he cleans toilets, struggles with progressively worsening hand tremors that threaten his ability to continue to clean toilets while also coming to terms with the fact that the new generation of toilet-cleaning robots are finally doing a really good job.