The Globe and Mail

A good one- or two-word title for a short story is almost inevitably best, narrowing the preview to a teasing essence. R.W. Gray, a dab hand at minimalist titling, opens this collection with The Bends.

We discover a young woman in a public pool, just “saved” by a lifeguard from an apparent near-drowning. Sarah, too bewildered to undermine the heroics, plays along. In any case, she could not possibly have explained that she was doing the dead man’s float an inch below the surface simply because the tickling-fizzing-caressing bubble stream from a team of scuba divers, and the image of one diver seated on the bottom and staring up at her, had reduced her to a helpless sorrow later to be identified as a pivotal moment of belated relationship withdrawal. Splayed poolside with her saviour bent over her, the cool air and shocking loss of watery immersion tells her that the warmer wet on her face is tears. You’ll need Gray himself to fill in the rest: a lovely, softly inflected flirtation with madness.

Sweet Tooth offers palate-stirring recipes between scenes from a two-couple dinner party. It’s a warm June night in August’s kitchen as she ponders the implications of feeding two boyfriends, one an ex, and the ex’s new lad. We shift interiors to her new beau, Jamie, who is noticing his own veering desire: “not a kind of thirst, but only an undercurrent.” The story’s strength is in its erotic tension, the cross-purpose tugs of lust, though the arrival of dessert bears a tad too much symbolic weight.

Crisp is a dream tale told by a trailer-park kid. It opens on a patch of life gone ordinarily unlucky. Soon it’s farcically ghastly. Dad burns up in his rusty getaway car. Mom pees herself laughing. Firemen casually enjoy the blaze, which goes on for days. Mom retires to her bedroom and begins to swell. As dreams go, it’s cut with enough normalcy to make it fascinating.

Seeds is a puzzler. Kevin, possessor of a green thumb, works in a nursery. He trips on the job and scrapes his head. Later, in a café, he becomes an object of interest for a young boy with an identically bandaged forehead. Kevin returns the boy’s wave, observing mother and boy. Mother leaves the table for a moment. Then Kevin is leaving the café hand-in-hand with the smiling boy. Next, he’s in a holding cell being questioned by the cops, but we don’t learn the outcome or gain any understanding of why Kevin (or the child) would do such a thing. The tale feels half-considered, its ending a frustrating surprise.

Undertow puts us back on track with an impromptu sex encounter in a basement apartment. The rainy day, the room’s large aquarium, the light filtering down from sidewalk-level windows – all combine to make cheating Kate feel “drowned on a Sunday. … The water weighs upon them … they have to move slowly.” A mid-point detour through a childhood treehouse parable feels extraneous, but the story wraps up smartly.

Roughhousing returns to the trailer park: two brothers alone with mom on a day of blinding rain, awaiting a father who’s out in a boat on the stormy strait. This one’s not a dream, but a portrait of how life (moms, little brothers, weather, dogs) can slip into random weirdness, spurring the aimless anxiety of dreams. Gray grafts a moving story arc onto the capricious tumble, conjuring meaning out of nonsense.

In Freighters, two guys buy matching copies of Sade’s Justine, probing their potential to morph friendship into unfettered lust. Both have boyfriends already, but there are reasons for that to change. As the story skirts around resolution, Sade holds the cards.

Gray shuns the lyrical, yet can loft his prose assuredly to the poetic. “Memory shapes differently here. In green muddled to dark root, fronds sprung from the muskeg floor, reaching to bare discarded light.” That’s from the longest story, Thirst, 20 pages of the book’s best: the shocks of the world experienced through the waking dreams, careless hungers and galloping imagination of a child.

Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail’s first-fiction reviewer.