What a Mother Hen Knows But Won’t Say

Abstract

These stories interweave various levels of reality, juggling fact and fantasy through the perspectives of various quirky and conventional characters of two fictional towns: Candle, a rural town with an economy based around a granite factory, and Watertown, a more developed and populated trade town located near a harbor. The stories occur over the course of several years, during which a young girl talks with a chicken, a woman who looks like a bird is concussed, and a man’s life is changed forever by a fish reincarnated as a woman.