When I first started reading Peg Alford Pursell’s new short story collection, A Girl Goes into the Forest, I went about it the wrong way. The collection has 78 stories (a number derived from the number of cards in the Tarot), and I devoured them, one after the other, like a box of chocolates, rushing in anticipation of a different, delicious flavor. Many of the stories—only one page long—invited that speed, as if they were whispering in your ear to speed up.

Fortunately, I happened to pick up Mavis Gallant’s short story collection and there, in the afterword, Gallant gave me the instruction manual on how to read Pursell’s collection.

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Some fiction requires that you pay attention. Pursell’s collection belongs in that category. I read them too fast; I didn’t pay attention, didn’t give them enough time to reverberate inside like ripples in a still lake. Pursell’s stories create stunning aftershocks, in part because of their endings. Tessa Hadley said, “So the ending, it should take you back inside the story.” Pursell’s endings do that, and they make you feel as if you’ve been physically altered, as though the words were pressed into you by a weight you can hardly fathom.

“Iguana,” just slightly over one page, unfolds through associations. The wife prefers her solitude, and as a result of her brooding the husband feels like he’s the odd man out. The wife steps outside and sees an iguana, “a model of stillness under the darkening sky.” She remembers her daughter had “inked a ring of like reptiles around one ankle, a bright green tattoo.” The image flows into a memory of her daughter, who became a dancer. The mother recently saw her perform, and she also saw bruises on her daughter’s throat.

The story ends with the mother/wife in the garden.

She turned her head and the iguana vanished. Quiet reigned. She lifted her face to the sky. She wanted rain to mist her face, wash down her neck, thrum on her throat. Water she could wipe away.

By invoking “throat,” we are taken back inside the story to the daughter’s bruises. The image of water suggests cleansing, a wiping away, a wish to take away her daughter’s harm.

“This ending was organic to me,” says Pursell. “Over a period of years or so I’ve internalized something. If the ending of a story feels unsatisfying, I go back to the story’s beginning because usually I find the ending there. If not, it sometimes means the story isn’t starting in the correct place.”

Many of Pursell’s endings land on images, summoning associational magic. As Catherine Brady writes in Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction, “Every image comes equipped with a built-in paradox, because it both aims the reader’s attention in a highly specific way and generates a profusion of implications and associations.” Through repetition and relation to a set of other images, the power of a single image is exponentially increased.

In “Unknown Animals,” another one-page story, a couple has gone camping, and the man has “had his say.” Pursell delicately suggests that the relationship has withered. The woman once loved these camping trips. She writes, “The excitement of animals lurking out there in the surrounding darkness.”

The story ends like this:

Soon he fell asleep. She listened for animals out there in the wilderness, for any sign at all.

Again, the ending sends us back into the story to a time when listening for the animals had been exciting. We sense she is yearning for the unknown, which suggest possibility.

“I’m someone in the school of William Carlos Williams—’‘No ideas but in things’—or T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative,” says Pursell. “The images have to carry or give the emotional tone. When I find there are places that I may have gotten too abstract or the sentences are too complicated or more thought-based, I work on those sections to find what is already in the story that can carry the emotional tone and interiority that I want to get across.”

In “My Father and His Beautiful Slim Brunettes,”’ a longer story at 15 pages, Pursell uses a different kind of ending, though one that—like the others—is Chekhovian. It doesn’t wind things up. The narrator is a singer, traveling with a band, having an affair with one of the band members. When she murmurs in her sleep, “My father and his beautiful slim brunettes,” we are soon whisked into the past, with scenes of a younger narrator witnessing her father’s obsession with brunettes. At the end of the story, the narrator returns home after a long hiatus. Her mother and father are there, along with her brother and his young son, who is being forced to read to the family, while the TV blares. They keep chastising the boy to read louder, “Your aunt can’t hear you.”

The narrator rebels and tells the child she hears him and doesn’t need to hear the story. “Shaking, I was shaking with wanting so much to say some one right thing, the exact words. I wanted words that would ring so true that they’d be undeniable for everyone.” If only there were such words, everything would be repaired. Instead, the narrator turns up the volume of the TV.

Then comes the ending:

What I remember about leaving the den was seeing in my peripheral vision something new and raw on the little boy’s face that, later, as I recalled it, as I often did, I liked to think was a spark of an idea about how he could be.

This time Pursell uses an image in opposition to an earlier image: the gender of the child is different from the narrator. She also leaps forward to the future with her parenthetical, “later, as I recalled it, as I often did,” which raises the importance of what happened.

“It was very important to me that the child be a boy,” says Pursell. “You sense the narrator’s oppressive childhood in this overwhelmingly patriarchal way her father and brother operated. It was important that the child was a boy because I wanted there to be some sense that there might be change, that this nephew can be different. We don’t know this for certain. There’s a hopefulness implied in this ending.”

In “Confection,” Pursell writes an altogether different ending that doesn’t invoke an image but makes an unexpected turn—a technique that betrays Pursell’s background as a poet. An uncle leaves a woman his property, which includes a Meyer lemon tree. The woman finds a handwritten recipe for lemon sherbet and asks the gardener to pick lemons so she can make a dessert for a party that she’s hosting. The party is held; the sherbet melts. The woman comes to understand the sherbet is unimportant and, with the party in full swing, she is not needed and can go to bed.

The story ends with this:

Pascal had sewn a parchment note into his jacket pocket to aid him in remembering his visions of god. He’d understood his revelations would fade.

“I knew this was the ending all along,” says Pursell. “I’ve always been fascinated by Pascal—he had mystical visions, and yet he felt the need to write it all out and sew it in his jacket pocket so he wouldn’t forget. My book is so much about our animal natures and why we have consciousness and how difficult it is to have a mind—what’s the purpose? What’s it all for?”

The ending, then, is associational, not necessarily through images, but through action. The woman had her own, non-mystical revelations: the sherbet didn’t matter, she wouldn’t be missed if she slipped away from her party. The ending also hearkens back to all the plans she made for her life, which the party has helped her understand that she’s unlikely, like Pascal, to remember to act upon.

I asked Pursell to pick a couple of her favorite sentences, a daunting task given the plethora of stunning prose.

The first sentence is from “Gilded Cage,” about an older woman who is hunched over and viewed by others as a witch. She lives alone, but as a girl, when her father was still alive, he’d give her a ride on his knee.

He was a rough man, many thought, but his large hand was gentle on her waist, and while she rode his thigh like a sure horse galloping down the meadowsides of the green hills, she chirped prettily, notes warmed and bubbled in her throat, and it was a time of being present to herself then, but to think of now, the opposite.

“I like it because it gets to what I think what interests me the most,” says Pursell. “What does it mean to be present to yourself? And if, looking back on it, was she truly present to herself or was a spell cast on her? Long sentences make things happen temporally, metaphorically, and can be filled with sensory detail. They are my obsession as an author.”

The second sentence is from “An Ancient Trade,” in which a mother recalls her estranged daughter. Interwoven is a story about amber.

She stood outside the jewelry store looking through the plate glass at a display of amber pendants in the cool afternoon, fog lying over the harbor at block’s end, dreaming of her daughter beside her, her girl’s face framed in the mirror set atop the display case, and asking her which necklace she liked, imagining how smooth the gem would feel to the touch, until the man inside stepped forward, close to the display, and smiled, his shadow falling over the case.

“I really think what works for me most is that the man breaks up the reverie,” says Pursell. “He has no idea what is going on, this reverie of the mother who has lost her daughter. He’s a salesman, hoping to conduct commerce. Naturally, it breaks her out of her daydream. It’s what happens in the world. The world won’t let us revel in our dreams forever. It comes along and says, buy a necklace. Carry it like a talisman.”

The story ends with this:

She pushed her hand deep into her coat pocket, adjusted her collar to cover the back of her neck, and moved into the shrouding fog.

“I also like that she spurns the salesman,” says Pursell. “She doesn’t replace her grief with a purchase. She says, essentially, I’m not going to get over it.”

Read A Girl Goes into the Forest slowly, carefully. After you finish a story, put the book down and wander around, letting the ending resound like a symphony in its closing movement, echoing and reverberating what has gone before. If you do that, you won’t be able to get over it.