FICTION

SMALL SPACES BETWEEN EMERGENCIES by Alison Moore (Mercury House: $18.95; 172 pp.) Hard-earned optimism is the hallmark of this aptly titled first collection by Alison Moore. Parents break up, teen-agers run away, cancer strikes, lovers fumble at communication and developers hover around the family ranch like buzzards. Yet in none of these 11 stories is the ending exactly a downer. Even when a young woman ditching her boyfriend lobs a four-letter word at him like a grenade, “it is, finally, the right word . . . hurled with the passion and conviction of a terrorist across a small, unwatched border.”

The thing about collections is that the stories can interact in unpredictable ways. We would accept the upbeat endings if we read them singly, with perhaps two exceptions: A woman reaches a too-smooth rapport with an elderly homeless man she picks up to work for her in return for food; and a divorced father too easily overcomes a lifetime of self-doubt when his 8-year-old son visits him in San Francisco. Working our way through “Small Spaces,” however, we come to expect the affirmation at the end and distrust it.

Fortunately, Moore begins and closes the collection with two of her strongest stories. A girl who has fed on her father’s tales of adventure runs off to have adventures of her own. The reality proves so nightmarish that she realizes that her father, too, must have untold stories dammed up inside him. Another girl is left by her estranged parents to work at a resort in South Dakota, where her loneliness and the conflict between the owners of the place are countered by touches of prairie magic.

In these stories, Moore shows originality, an acute, if slightly skewed, view of relationships and a style that, beneath a quiet surface, hums with metaphor. To a man disoriented by a fall from a horse, saguaro cactus “seem both alien and familiar shapes to him, the way a garden hose . . . looks to a cat that has never seen a snake but carries a picture of the shape in its mind.”