One of the problems involved in reviewing short stories is that everything becomes a spoiler, especially with a punchy writer like Alexandra Leggat. Just as she’s setting up riddles, the writer quickly switches to short-circuiting expectations. I’ll tread carefully.

“Wide,” Leggat’s first story, has a terse first-person narrative in which the writer delays, perhaps too long, letting the reader know what is really going on. Jess is affected in some way: he can’t talk; he bangs his fists against the ground; he bruises easily; he points; he falls asleep to the sound of static on TV. His wife narrates the five pages, following him out into a cornfield and back. Another man pulls up and, for reasons unknown, trims branches from their fir tree. It’s all a little too vague for an opening salvo.

Leggat hits her stride with the collection’s title story, “Animal.” Here, mysteries abound, but she manages to show depth and heart in only four pages. The story begins when the narrator’s brother, Cyril, phones her from JFK Airport. Cyril is always phoning while on his way to someplace else, “so he has a reason to abort the conversation if it’s not going his way.” In its brief page count, the story covers several months’ time, during which the narrator seeks out animals in the woods, hoping to catch a close-up glimpse of a coyote, using her dog’s droppings as an attractant.

In “The Last Monsoon,” a town attempts to recover, emotionally and economically, from its last monsoon by holding a festival named the Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off. Deliciously cruel and comical, the story hinges on a mayor with a pigeon problem, a farmer with a patch devoted to 800-pound pumpkins, and his widowed mother, who for very good reasons won’t use electric light bulbs. Although Leggat occasionally swit- ches point of view too quickly, she tricks out the details expertly. “The kitchen,” she writes, “smells of feline urine and over-kept cut flowers.”

In the closing story, “Colt 45,” a woman plays football in her sleep, for the Indianapolis Colts, mouth guard firmly in place. When she wakes, her body aches: “…everywhere, everywhere, from my fingertips to my coccyx to my big toe and everything, everything in between. Then it dawns on me. I press my fists into my thighs. I know that pain — Coach must have kept me in the game last night and I slept through it.”

Sent to a therapist by her boyfriend, she — oopsies, I said I’d tread lightly with the spoilers. Let’s just say this immensely rewarding collection is worth picking up to find out the rest.