Sky over El Nido.

C. M. Mayo lives in Mexico City, and dedicates this work, a first collection of stories, to her grandfather, Frank R. Mayo, "who knew how to travel the world." Ms. Mayo is a chip off the old block. These thirteen stories span a remarkably variegated set of characters and situations around the world, from upscale jet-setters to the proletariate. The title story gives us the big, sadistic laugh that Argentine jail guards get from prisoners who, forgetting they are about to be tortured or "disappeared," demand maple syrup with their breakfast waffles; and in "What Fish This Fish?" we move to cocktail hour in a nameless African nation, as a fastidious G-7 banker tries to explain to the thug who rules the country, between swatting away malarial mosquitos and a burst of machine gun fire (to shoot a whimpering dog), why 73 percent of the next year's sweet potato crop will have to be exported (balance of payments problems). The moral: little shark eats big shark - the best comment on structural readjustment I've read in years.

Mayo evokes the smells, tastes, and weather of these settings as palpably as she probes the moods of her characters. Place, time, and people thus stick to your ribs long after you've put a story down. The sense of these taut tales - as opposed to their obvious craft and surface polish - then catches up with you, in a kind of delayed reaction. Thing, deeper meaning, you begin to often lies between the lines, in what is

The first story introduces us to the globetrotting, thrice@married Chabela del Rio y de la Fuente Contreras, who is having trouble getting out of bed this day. (It sounds like this happens often.) "I call my maid: Bring me a cucumber and a knife. On each eyelid, I place a slice of cool." The sybaritic Chabela is ostensibly trying to recollect her (now deceased) mother - the woman who reneged on leaving Chabela those Aubusson carpets she'd promised, the wild wife of the ambassador to the Court of Saint James who, while Hitler's bombs rained down, rushed out into the street in her blue silk bathrobe, "a cigar jammed into the side of her mouth like Mr. Churchill," and rescued (or had she?) three frightened zebras that had escaped from the London zoo. Could that have been her mother, a week before she died, rollerblading through New York's Central Park with a black man, "wearing striped stretch pants and a white sweatshirt that said FREE THE..."? Chabela cannot tell ("I could not read the rest, she disappeared around a bend").

Important things - soulful things - are always disappearing around bends in these elliptical stories, and the haunted searchers of memory often miss the signs - of life, of love, of "ordinary unhappiness" or impending catastrophe. Small or large catastrophes, though, sometimes bring release.

In "The Wedding" you think you're once again privy to the disconnected ruminations of another rich Mexico City matron - who in this case is unaccountably avoiding her granddaughter's wedding Mass. Before you are through, though, Lola is "ready" for something neither she nor the reader expects. There she is, "running across the grass faster than she can remember running in years and years. She is aware of the riffle of the jacaranda's leaves, the smell of yellow-green grass cuttings, of a great empty space beneath her rib cage" as she dives into the swimming pool to save - who? what? - someone she doesn't even know, a maid's drowning child. Her daughter Carmen, she of the perfectly polished, very long nails, will not understand; it will ruin the party.

The plot lines that Mayo's characters imagine they are living, that they (or an omniscient narrator) describe so vividly, frequently aren't to the point. An elusive something else disturbs the air. "I thought I would see another jaguarundi. But I never have, not once in my life," says the now stricken, once love-sick playboy-poet in "The Jaguarundi." In much of this story, he's taking care of his mistress's small, pet jaguar while she's away - living like a monk (with a fat portfolio) - writing unsent poems to her and quietly running through her husband's liquor supply. The rhythm of the reportage exactly captures his growing dedication to the animal (does he love the woman or her cat more?) as well as the emptiness in his strangely austere life. Years later, after living aimlessly in Cairo and Tangiers, the affair with this woman by then a blank, he seeks out the jaguar, then lock up in a zoo behind glass. "I clapped my hands, but the jaguarundi didn't move. Its food dish was covered with flies. I clapped my hands again, louder this time, and its eves flicked open. The jaguarundi looked at me without moving. Then it yawned ... I thought I might tap on the glass, call out its name. But for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was." The piece is utterly haunting.

In "The Third Day," disaster interrupts an ordinary young life on the slopes of Mt. Shasta. Caught in an unexpected blizzard on a cross-country skiing outing, Jane vainly tries to hold onto the safe and well-defined world that she and Bobby left three days ago. She's a travel agent behind a "Formicatop desk with a telephone, a fax, a vase of brilliant paper flowers," she reminds herself as if it were a dream, and Bobby "sells something - computers, or restaurant supplies, or was it bank accounts?" They're lost, their former identities now whited out, dissolved, and what incongruously races through Jane's mind is that moment years ago when she lured a little Mexican boy to leap off a roof (to his death?). It was just a game (what got into her?). And this date with Bobby was to be just a game, too - only as chance would have it, the weather turned, and their map, matches, sunblock, and fruitbars are no match for it.

Chance events work their will - sometimes lethally, sometimes playfully and humorously - in many of these stories. Accident and coincidence accumulate, turning into either harsh destiny or, ironically, into something akin to an eerie providence. At the overt level, flux and fragmentation rule. Those who delusively count on permanence had better watch out. (They rarely do.) In "Willow," a young New York bond trader returning to visit an old high school classmate in Wisconsin and finds that nothing is what she imagined it to be. For years she has been measuring her own success against the chaos she'd concocted for her friend's life - all fantasy. Another, much sadder study of this theme is to be found in "Majesty," the story of Ana, a painfully footloose little girl on holiday with her absentee mother at a Phoenix luxury hotel, who keeps boasting to anyone who will listen that "I can have whatever I want." Sorry, the glossy celebrity magazines lie.

In Mayo's world those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, provided they are feisty enough, have fewer illusions than the spoiled rich, and fare better. At least they have more fun. The final story, "Rainbow's End," is a whirl in every sense, and sends you scrambling back to a name (Peter Rainbow) barely recalled from a walk-on part in the earlier story "Willow" - and then full circle to the first story. The narrator, once upon a time a common cane-cutter, is Juventino Perez Lopez, third husband of Chabela del Rio y de la Fuente Contreras, and thanks to a little graft now the governor of Veracruz and an immensely rich man. Not surprisingly, we learn that Chebela's mother, she of the zebras and rollerblading, liked Juventino a lot - two of a kind as it were through he is grateful grandma didn't leave them those worn Aubussons).

The haywire circuits of our whole electrically but not ethically connected global village stand exposed in Mayo's work. Sky over El Nido won the 1995 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. I am not surprised.