In sixteen short stories and a novella, Anne Leigh Parrish explores the magic of life, love, and the soft boundary between fact and fantasy. The wife of an artist disappears under mysterious circumstances; a woman has the gift of taking away sorrow; another finds inner strength through writing poetry; and a great-grandmother spends the day sitting on a folding chair in a grocery store parking lot, contemplating the nature of the human heart. What Nell Dreams is Parrish's eighth book of fiction.