Where the Time Goes

P-town, aka Provincetown, Mass., is the common ground of the dozens of motley characters in Skillings's beguiling fourth book of short stories. Skillings, who charted the same small-town's down-and-outers in P-town Stories: or, The Meatrack (1980), puts inventive, colloquial language to satisfying use in these innovative and darkly humorous tales. Successfully employing a wide range of voices, forms and lengths (entries vary from one paragraph to several pages), he describes alcoholics falling off the wagon, gay men struggling with coming out and the havoc wreaked by AIDS. Everyone rails against conformity, including Kyle, the little boy with two mommies in ""Sandbox,"" who has decided that he ""prefers to be a girl."" In ""Coughlan Dice at His Closet Window,"" the narrator's glee at a young townie's ignominious retreat back to P-town from MIT is tinged with obvious envy as he comments, ""they're [P-towners] glad to have their born faith confirmed that there's nothing up there beyond the bridge, nothing worth leaving town for."" Those who stay in town battle their demons with strength, wit and a strong sense of the absurd, heading all the while for catharsis: solutions are elusive and almost always unexpected. One panacea, at least, is prescribed in ""Op Ed,"" a cheeky take on Swift's ""A Modest Proposal,"" in which the narrator advocates masturbation as the precursor to a reign of ""joy and kindness."" (Aug.)