LIMEROCK: Maine Stories, by Christopher Fahy, Coastwise Press, Thomaston, Maine, 206 pages, paperback, $12.95.

I love short stories. They offer a serene slight slice of life in an otherwise hectic world.

Christopher Fahy’s book of Maine stories, “Limerock,” offers such a quick read imbued with snippets of credible characters. Though the book is ostensibly about Maine, some of the tales transcend the rocky coast’s bounds.

The people Fahy creates tackle illness, aging, miscarriage and death, as they scrape out a hardscrabble existence. The award-winning author juxtaposes poor Mainers’ grubby hands and homes with abundant fresh air and blueberries aplenty.

In her blurb on the back of Fahy’s book, author Cathie Pelletier sums up Fahy’s style. “He puts normal people into the most troubling circumstances, then watches … to see what they will do.” His grasp of colloquial speech and the natives’ disgust about wealthy “outastatas” moving in to take what they want should ring true to Maine readers.

In “The Smell of Spring,” Jim returns to his home after his sister, Diane, called saying, “Gramp’s wicked sick. He can’t last much longer, the doctor says.” Jim had been forced to move away from home to find work. He wound up employed by “summer people: lawyers, both of them, not yet thirty, who’d bought an old wreck of a row house in Philadelphia.”

Jim’s lawyer employers grudgingly granted him time off, after he assured them that their renovation would be complete by the agreed-upon time. “`We’ll make it,’ Jim said, with an audible drag on his cigarette.”

In “The Rock” a story of coming home and coming of age, Oram finds the job market tough. “After three years as a gofer at Holcombe’s Lumber and another two years at Shop ‘n Save, he sure needed something better … and he didn’t want to move to Massachusetts to get it.” So he went into selling real estate in Maine.

After a slow start, Oram convinced an elderly woman that the camp she and her husband had paid $50 for a half-century ago could fetch $40,000. A pair of potential purchasers who drove up in “a burgundy Volvo with New York plates” offered half the asking price on the cottage where Oram had gone swimming as a boy.

He suddenly begins reminiscing about swimming to a big rock and the good times he had as a child. The memories begin to give him second thoughts about the sale in spite of the commission he stands to gain.

This story was particularly meaningful for me. I also had an affinity for a certain rock in the water at my parents’ camp at Beech Hill Pond in Otis. As a girl, I set a goal to swim underwater from the shore to that big boulder. When I was 10, I made it only a few feet before bursting up to the surface, coughing and spewing water. But by the time I was 12, I could make it all the way.

That’s another good thing about stories. They have a way of piquing readers’ memories and inspiring wishes of others. Fahy’s book does both of those things admirably.

One warning: Reading this book is somewhat like opening a bag of potato chips. Once you’ve tried one, it’s nearly impossible to stop.