Pollen

With wit and sensitivity, these tales portray moments of suffering, confusion, and discovery and introduce the reader to worlds as widely various as Japanese kite-making, bees, daycare, alcohol, and motorcycle maintenance. Abrays stories push full-on into the world of obsessions. A new vacuum cleaner becomes a pawn in a just-ended relationship. Riding-a-motorbike becomes the way brothers bond over their troubled relationship with their father. A wise naturalist takes the reader on a comic tour of an animal-filled mall, and a bee infestation in a kitchen forces three urban apartment-sharing youths to suddenly confront nature and their own changing relationship.