Ethereal and haunting, quizzical and funny and stoutly original, the stories in Kellie Wells' Compression Scars hover above the page. The collection is Wells' debut, and winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, whose past winners include Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, Peter Meinke and Molly Giles.
           In Wells' universe, the body is a tormentor, often misshapen or beset with odd terminal illnesses. In "My Guardian, Claire," a young boy's mother is killed by "a girdle of shingles"; in "A. Wonderland," the bewitching thirteen-year-old protagonist suffers heart palpitations; and in the title story the narrator's best friend bears scars from a childhood accident which cause a disease the doctors can't pin down. Characters tumble down stairs and careen down hills on bikes with no brakes. There are blind men and conjoined twins of different genders.
           The characters deal with these afflictions with sardonic or off-kilter humor, the same way they deal with the loss that is the collection's other linchpin. The children in the book are always missing a parent, via death, disappearance, divorce. They're raised by bewildered single parents or guardians and the flights of their hyper-developed imaginations. They don't find answers but position and reposition themselves in relation to the questions they ponder.
           Clancy is the nineteen-year-old protagonist of "Blue Skin," a poignant story about vulnerability, a celebration of childhood. Clancy and his young sister Willa have been abandoned by their mother, and their relationship is affecting. In a flashback, we see Clancy watching cartoons while his mother, who hasn't yet left them, is in the bedroom with a strange man:

Clancy remembers tapping on his knee with a plastic hammer and kicking his leg in the air. He tapped up and down his legs and began hitting harder. He chipped away at his shins like a geologist freeing a fossil. He dropped the hammer and ground his fists into his calves. He bent forward and bit his feet.

His mother rushes in, and he announces he is no longer Clancy, but "Clem Cadiddlehopper."
           Compression Scars is bursting with hallucinatory images, plays on words ("Walk Stickly and Carry a Big Soft") and unbelievably witty dialogue. "Do I win you?" asks the narrator of "Swallowing Angels Whole," one of the book's quirkiest entries. "Which words do you pass on, which ones ingest?"
           It's a more than relevant question in a book that frolics in language like a nine-year-old in a mound of fallen leaves. Wells is tremendously limber with her prose. But she often blunts the force of crisp and lovely sentences by adding two or three more that merely drag out the concept. And the bigger problem is that the bizarre and magical humor that gives the collection so much of its character is worked to excess. In "A. Wonderland," Wells writes, "She imagines herself a tiny onion, layer upon layer of intricate skin, wrapped in herself, never opening voluntarily, never blooming." This is tactile and evocative, and perfect, thematically. But Wells adds, "She rests at the cool bottom of someone's martini. She sits, unblinking, atop someone's slice of beef bordeaux."
           By this point, two-thirds through the book, we've seen so much of these flights of fancy, that while they are resplendent in their imaginative force, they begin to seem cloying and superfluous. (It doesn't help that the protagonist in this story calls herself Alison Wonderland.) Another line that suffers from excessive cuteness pops up in the closer, "Hallie Out of this World." The teenaged narrator meets a blind man named Oedipus, and nicknames him Oed: "O-E-D, like the dictionary."
           When attending to serious existential questions, Wells is tough and brooding. In "My Guardian, Claire," the narrator posits: "Before we are born, though, we're tiny fibers coiled in a cosmic blanket that connects us with everything, a throw God covers himself with when he's chilled." Here, Wells' stunning language is deeply grounded in the story's thematic concerns–necessary and forceful.
           Wells' vision is sure and clear, a sense of foreboding always mingling with the wicked humor, but at times the cohesion of the book, the mood that runs through, reads as repetition. Too many of the characters share the same imagination, which not only stretches believability but makes them devices as much as characters. The worst manifestation of this is in "My Guardian, Claire," when the male narrator sounds like many other narrators, and thus, female. Perhaps a dominant mood or style point would be best accomplished by other means.
            Of the eleven stories, the strongest are "Blue Skin," "A. Wonderland," and "Godlight." These are the warmest ones, and those with the most movement, both in terms of character and plot. Other stories are nearly amorphous, often long, flowing character sketches.