BOOK REVIEW / SHORT STORIES : Take Time for Quick but Rewarding Reads : PRIZE STORIES 1994 <i> edited and with an introduction by William Abrahams</i> ; Doubleday $10.95 paperback, 400 pages

Ah, short stories; the working mother’s favorite fiction. They fit right in between putting on the water for the pasta and debating the merits of the bi-nightly bath with an adamant 4 1/2-year-old. They reward the exhausted reader by providing conflict and resolution in a condensed package. You can enter and exit a fantasy before your eyelids begin to droop. Heaven.

This collection is supposed to be the best, winners of the 1993 O’Henry competition. I have a happy Pavlovian response to the name O’Henry; every time I hear it, I think about the girl with the long hair who cut it to buy her husband a watch chain--for the watch he sold to buy her combs for her hair. Or the artist who painted a leaf on a wall so an elderly neighbor who expected to die when the last leaf fell would have to hang on a while longer. A good short story is such a refined entity, such an evocative mix of imagination and discipline.

If the publisher has made any mistake here, it was to lead off with this year’s winner, “Better Be Ready ‘Bout Half Past Eight,” by Alison Baker. It’s an almost impossible act to follow. Byron is a young scientist, an affectionate husband, a doting dad to baby Toby, and a longtime best friend to another lab rat, Zach--who shakes Byron’s circumscribed world one day by announcing his intention to become Zoe, thanks to the marvels of hormones and plastic surgery. Byron tumbles into a wonderland of sexual confusion, a place at once funny and poignant.

In a scene that will make any ambivalent child wince, he pulls his T-shirt back over his head (so that it resembles a woman’s pageboy), borrows some of his wife’s lipstick and-- voila! oh, no!--stares into the mirror and sees reflected the unpleasantly familiar visage of his late and not so lamented mother. He takes Toby along to purchase a gift for Zach/Zoe’s coming-out shower and falls into the effusive clutches of a salesclerk who thinks he’d look grand in a little magenta eye shadow. And he keeps having to face Zach in transition.

It’s a wonderfully sad, appropriately befuddled story that manages, in its last moments, to convincingly suggest that anything’s possible--without ever becoming sentimental or sloppy about the notion. The water on the stove boiled over, unnoticed, waiting for me to finish reading.

“We Didn’t,” by Stuart Dybek, is a more meditative effort, although one that manages, with a deft twist, not to be about what it seems. At first it reads like some distant reverse relative to the final scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which a young boy reflects on how many ways he and his beloved managed not to consummate their love; how many ways she managed to say no.

But it has little to do, really, with their sexual passion--more, interestingly, with how a sad coincidence blights their feelings for each other, how the tragic memory of a complete stranger can alter a seemingly obvious story of young love.

There’s something here for almost everyone, including the sort of wry story where the author talks just over her shoulder to the reader. In “Where She Was,” by Helen Fremont, the passing comments get a bit arch. But that’s to be expected: The narrator is a young woman trying to come to terms with the secret love affair she’s having with another woman (“No, my mother doesn’t know. She thinks Jana and I are friends. I love that word: friends .”), and defensive cleverness is her natural posture. But just as the writing begins to verge on the precious, tenderness sneaks in and saves the day.

It’s a refreshing collection to dip into, to pick and choose from. Nice to know that writers are out there working away at the fine, if slightly out of fashion craft of short-story writing. Hey, it may not pay like movie-of-the-week scripts, but the emotional rewards are great.