SOUTHERN LIVING, JUNE 2004 The Ocean Was Salt stories by Loretta Cobb (Livingston Press, $14.95) Short stories provide the perfect reading material for summer. Lazy hours of heat, sand, and water lend themselves to something less than a novel-length commitment. Yet you still want content that stays with you longer than an ice-cream cone on a hot day. This Alabama author accommodates us with a titled and thematic collection that often centers on the primeval body of water we seek instinctively when the sun soars. "Before We Crawled to Tears" depicts a young man at the beach with his family, vainly trying to deny his redneck trappings. When a woman dies in another tale, she floats "toward the endless blue peace, that wordless line between the sea and the sky." In "Feeling Salty," we sympathize with Nick, a father trying to overcome destructive bursts of anger "timing his breathing with the mystery of the sea pounding in his ear." Not all of the stories focus on the ocean, but each produces primal feelings that ask you to explore changing currents in the bottomless sea of emotions. Nancy Dorman-Hickson