Hugo nominees for 2014 (shortlist @ post 156 on page 8)

[felice]

Sure. But the same is true of both the short stories I mentioned: honestly, the SFF elements in those stories make no actual difference.

Arguably, but at least the SFF elements are pervasive in the shorts. You might be able to tell stories with more or less the same plots, but they'd feel very different.

Without meaning to get all pretentious, the point, as I take it, is that the Springs (and the possible monster within) represent people

What possible monster? One of the key attractions of the springs is that you can see all the way to the bottom. Only Levi, the little kid, seems particularly interested in monster stories, and even he's not at all afraid of the spring. I think you've got a valid reading, but I don't think it comes across strongly in the text. The springs themselves and the historical events and people depicted being entirely real works against any metaphor for me.

This seems a somewhat generous way of saying 'this isn't a fantasy story, but fantasy stories are referenced by a character in the text'. A character discussing legends doesn't make a story SFF, surely?

Told in the text, not just referenced (albeit in a pretty perfunctory way in Selkie's case). You could delete all the stuff about Mona and still have left a story purely about selkies, though it would be a much weaker story. Delete the non-fantasy elements from Springs, and you'd have far less, and that started out as a novella. You can choose to read the narrator's mother being a selkie as purely metaphor, but there's nothing in the text to imply it's not literally true. I'd consider Selkie to be a bit borderline for inclusion in the Hugos, but Springs is way beyond the border.

Nonetheless, the author clearly isn't interested in that element as anything other than a sort of visual evidence of lying. (I see it as metaphorical because the way it works is to cause discomfort or inconvenience, even danger, for the liar.)

Metaphorical in the sense that lying in the real world can be uncomfortable, or dangerous if you're found out? That's a bit of a stretch; the certainty provided by the water essentially eliminates the option of lying deliberately, as well as forcefully correcting people if they say something they don't really mean or if they're deceiving themselves. This would radically change society, and would be an interesting concept to explore further.