The sixteen stories in this slim volume by Cheryl Pappas may be short, but they’re large-hearted and packed with beautiful nuggets of mystery and resonance. These micro and flash gems exist in surrealist or slightly off-kilter realms, and the style and form of the stories varies to pleasing effect. As the title suggests, the stories often center on hunger in its many forms.

Clarity is sometimes a result of hunger. In “The Root,” hunger is a life force, a root: “The day I cut the root, I die.” Because hunger, in this case, is essential to the narrator’s existence, she must maintain her connection with it.

The opposite is true in “The Golden Apple.” Here, a feeling of fullness is linked with liberation. The story imagines a man ruling over a kingdom of women. The women dig and work and suffer under the man’s iron fist. Hunger clarifies nothing here, and satiation is essential: “As the women sink their teeth into the succulent oranges, they will watch as the fences disappear one by one, and the soil all over the land will grow dark and wet.”

Thus, the book does not settle for easy answers about the value of hunger or satiation, but instead explores how women (and, occasionally, men) move between the two states and what these movements awaken or suppress in a soul.

In “Dreaming of Tulips,” a dark fairytale, a king’s hubris blinds him to the threat of snake-monsters fattening up to disrupt his royal comfort. The danger lurking outside the castle’s fortifications ironically and effectively parallels the scenes inside, where the king’s subjects flatter him. Altogether the story is a delicious portrait of an out-of-touch ruler — a man who doesn’t have enough hunger in his life — felled by ego. As naked women bathe the narcissistic despot, the reader roots for his downfall. Another fairytale piece, “Gretel’s Stepfather” is a retelling of sorts. Instead of breadcrumbs, Gretel has left a trail of pills that her stepfather finds.

Pappas uses the hermit crab form — in which a non-literary piece of writing, such as a recipe, is put to literary use — to beautifully convey in familiar structures the vulnerability of desire and loss. “Profile,” a hermit crab story written as a dating bio, starts with the standard getting-to-know-you list: “I really like movies. I enjoy fine dining at nice restaurants. Long walks, etc., etc.” But this boilerplate soon gives way to a plea for fulfillment: “You, you will fill up everything for me so that I can finally be what it is I crave, so intense.”

Another hermit crab story, “Hunger,” is structured as a mathematical problem. Beginning with the banal subject matter typical of the form — “Roger has 22 apples. He gives 5 to his baby sister, Rory” — the story transitions into defamiliarization when serious subjects disrupt expectations dictated by the form. For instance, one wouldn’t expect to find references to family debt or addiction in an elementary school math problem, so these topics become jarring in the context of a child’s lesson:

The new movie theater in town, with plush velvet seats, charges $28 a ticket.
Dave and Michelle have $14.38 in their account, because Dave lost his job.
If they don’t pay more than the minimum balance of $37 for five years, how much would they have to pay on their credit card, including interest, to take little Ricky and Mike to see the new Disney film?

Sherry is an only child born in a small town in New Hampshire (there were farms, meadows, and an uncle who touched her).
She has lived in 12 cities since high school.
How many new cities will she unpack boxes in before she finds a home in herself? Bonus if you can figure out how many rehab clinics.

The scenarios hypothesized in the problem become increasingly unfit for a child’s consumption; the story’s container becomes the source of its tension.

Not all the stories fit into formal packages. A couple goes to the beach after a fight in “The View From Here,” a straightforward narrative about a relationship on the rocks that alternates between the scene on the beach and facts about Olympus Mons:

This time feels different, but is it? The sun splinters light in all directions like grasping, fiery wings taking possession of the sky. Like it’s going to sleep. But really the earth is edging up to meet it. My butt already hurts from the hard sand.

It’s possible that Olympus Mons is still active, and it could have erupted as recently as tens of millions of years ago.

The result of the braided narratives is a quiet, realistic story shot through with the tense expectation of an actual eruption.

The book’s variety keeps the reader engaged. Many of the stories originally appeared in literary magazines that run the aesthetic gamut, from SmokeLong Quarterly to Hobart to Fairytale Review. This breadth of publications makes sense. Pappas’ extensive range is evident throughout.

Economy of language is this author’s superpower, and the book’s magic is often in what’s left unsaid. If you’re looking for plot-heavy realism, you won’t find it here. But readers seeking oddballs, fables, funny outsiders, and language selected with a poet’s precision need look no further.

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Cheryl Pappas is an American writer living outside Boston. Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in Juked, The Chattahoochee Review, Hobart, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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Amy Lyons writes fiction and non-fiction. Her book reviews, theatre reviews, and essays have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Washington City Paper, Backstage, LA Weekly, and The Independent. Her fiction has appeared in Lunch Ticket, 100 Word Story, Literary Mama, No Contact and others. She won an honorable mention from Miami Book Fair’s 2021 Emerging Writer Fellowship in Fiction, a 2020 Best of the Net nomination, a 2020 Best Small Fictions nomination, and a 2019 residency at Millay Colony for the Arts. She’s former VP of the LA Drama Critics Circle and holds an MFA from Bennington.