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Kat Meads creates alternative realities, and amazingly, it takes her four pages, max. “Little Pockets of Alarm” (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.: Charlotte; 146 pages, paper, $14.95) is a smart and feisty collection of what she calls “tales short and shorter.”

A customer service clerk grants and denies units of time, according to strict Bureau guidelines. People must make their requests at the counter in Bldg. F in person. A Cinderella loses her self-confidence and hesitates about attending the ball. A road rage encounter, California style, on U.S. 1 involves an oh-so contemporary couple in a Miata and a biker and his babe on a Harley. The East Coast, West Coast cultural clash in the car careens the encounter with the bikers into a strip-show burlesque.

Then, there’s the debate on “the impact of reclusive on life, art, family, community and pets” between Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson. The narrator, sitting in the audience, eagerly waiting for the authors to appear, tells us: “Briefly, the curtain at the back of the stage balloons. The wait is crushing, killing. It is exceedingly difficult for us to hold our water. We are in grave danger of succumbing to the strain.”

Although these descriptions might make the scenarios seem far-fetched, they aren’t. (Hey, we all live in our own crazy bubbles). Meads writes most of them so well you’re immediately hooked. A character finds himself in a bad predicament. You’re there with him as it teeters and collapses into disaster. Most of the time, too, you can’t help but laugh. These shorts are outrageous and funny.

Meads is a native of North Carolina, from one of its far edges, Currituck County. She holds a degree in psychology from UNC-CH and an MFA in creative writing from UNCG. She now lives at another edge, California, where she is alumni association editor at San Jose State University.

North Carolina informs several of the short fictions. A middle-aged conniving nephew pays ‘pity visits’ on a widowed, aging aunt who despises the sight of him. Two elderly sisters, housemates, scheme of ways to induce a peeping tom to revisit their house.

From the North Carolina flavored short, “Breeding,” here is this:

When Jakie asked Aunt Bet, the most forthright of the dissembling Shells, if all her relatives were odd, Bet began the evaluations with Francesca. “Let’s put it this way,” she said. “Your mother managed all right at first with my brother’s gambling, even with his women, but she’s not constitutionally strong as she should have been to marry into the Shells. I said as much at the wedding. Back then she was charmed by his recklessness.”

Meads, though, as a writer is constitutionally strong enough for the Shells or anybody else from Currituck to California.