Flash Fiction International

by Robert Shapard James Thomas

  A while later, as if in a dream, in a painting cut up into pure colors, into absolute oil colors, comes the image of mama with her hands raised high above her head, dressed in a long green dress, mama running through the garden and shouting, her body trembling (I watch her, without moving), pulling my sister by the hand and feeling the first stings, the first of many stings that will leave her in a rocking chair for a week, swollen and sad. Holding my sister by one hand and waving the other arm, in pain, crazed, mama runs to the pool on the shady side of the house, picking up my sister who is immune to the bees who don’t want to sting her, throws her in the water, all the way, she can stand in the pool with her head out of the water and from that head that’s sticking out, my blond, freckle-faced sister, my beautiful sister with cat eyes, surrounded by bees buzzing around her and drowning, with perfect white teeth, with pink lips, is laughing. Gales of laughter. She doesn’t stop laughing and she keeps laughing when mama, defeated, sits on the edge of the cement deck of the pool, places her head in her hands, looks at the red earth between her feet, and cries. For her pain, for her rage, for that daughter with green eyes who doesn’t stop laughing.

  Translated by Katherine Silver

  ARGENTINA

  Hotel Room

  Juan José Saer

  THE GUEST STARES at himself for a while in the mirror, deeply absorbed. His life and immediate tasks aren’t enough to distract from his face, his naked body. He’s gotten heavy, it seems. He’s closing in on forty. Haven’t women begun to not notice him now? A few years more and he’ll be plainly elderly, one of these interchangeable old men wandering city streets, ignored by the crowd, anonymous and gray. In his youth he imagined old age to be the age of wisdom; lately it seems little more than a slow, inevitable reduction to animal. For years lived, all that remains is fallible flesh.

  But these thoughts pass quickly. His traveling companion, having lingered at the beach, bursts abruptly into the bathroom and, brushing past, begins undressing beside the tub. The man contemplates her in the mirror: the girl’s firm suntanned body is even more striking and wild as she unties her hair—with two or three skillful flips it spills onto her shoulders. Later, she scrubs her body vigorously under the spigot, eyes closed, head raised as if by instinct to deflect heavy rain. The memory of his own fallibility dissolves, swept away by this dense, persistent presence, this vivid living lump occupying the brilliant bathroom granting it substance and meaning.

  While he pays the bill in the restaurant, the girl decides that this man she’s lived with fifteen months hasn’t surrendered his secrets. Why the silence, these somber looks, the abrupt answers followed by (one can’t help but observe) immediate, heartfelt apologies? On the outside, yes, he would appear to be healthy, he’s very sturdy and lively. The man’s unease, the girl tells herself now, wouldn’t seem bad if it were hers: I’m fairly unstable, she thinks, and my demands for constancy, for unstinting support, are for him perhaps an unbearable burden. I’ll be more open from now on, she thinks generously, to fleeting living, and not try so hard to arrange things beforehand. As they leave the restaurant, the girl—having defeated (with optimism, or perhaps resignation) her difficult thoughts—abandons herself to the man’s gracious gesture, his arm on her shoulders drawing her close to his chest. Slowly and happily they cross the deserted city toward the hotel, where, slightly later, flung naked on the bed, post-copulation, they surrender themselves separately to their own thoughts, and that slow disintegration preceding sleep, which one might call the result of exhaustion, suspect as one may that the blackness it ends in is the true, ongoing state of mind, after all.

  The hotel manager, working the counter all morning, sees them exit the elevator a little before noon. He hands them the bill and takes their money, retaining the change—the guest, tipping his head toward the upper floors, indicates it should be left for the maids. After the pair disappear past the spacious half-open door, he forgets them at once, secreting the original bill (the duplicate went with the guest) between the leaves of a hidden ledger he carries; such double accounting helps soften his taxes. At this hour in the lobby—a bit pretentious, passé—no one is here. The September sun streams in the wide window facing the boulevard. The armchairs are empty, the TV is off. For two or three minutes nothing happens at all (the man immobile beside the counter, thinking his thoughts). Then there’s the familiar thud of the elevator, summoned from above, echoing in the brightly lit lobby.

  Translated by Kirk Nesset

  UNITED STATES

  The Nihilist

  Ron Carlson

  HE WAS ON a plane again and now it was late, he’d missed a connection in Denver, and the west was dark and the big plane flew west in the night. It was half full and the people had spread out and the men were sprawled on three seats sleeping where they could. The steward had come by and brought him a coffee where he worked alone in a row at the back of the plane and then she brought him three packages of cookies and smiled and said, Knock yourself out. He looked at her and said, I’m not even on this plane. I was on the earlier one. He was tired now for the first time on his long trip, five or six cities, and the hotels and he had held up and then today the fall sun had laid itself across the hills of Utah in a way he recognized and loved and it hurt him, such beauty, and it seemed to be change itself and change had been a hard teacher for the man for these years, and he was sick of beauty and he was sick of change, but it didn’t stop them from cracking his heart. My fucking heart’s cracked, he had said to himself so long ago now. And now, on the plane, he was just tired. Your heart, he said aloud. Who cares. Who fucking cares. It helped and felt good to use profanity when he was tired. It was lovely to spit ugly questions full of profanity when you were tired. The plane was roaring its whisper and he didn’t even care now. He had wanted to get home for some reason and now he would get there and who cared. He was smiling with his new nihilism. He was quite the fucking nihilist. Oh, he could zero with the best of them. He could out-nothing the heavyweights. Then his nihilism grew thin and he was simply alone on a plane far from earth. His nihilism was fraudulent. He twisted his mouth in a way he sometimes did when vexed and now he was vexed as a fraudulent nihilist. He cared about too much. He could marshal his fucking nihilism for about five seconds and then the world came up for him, all the people he cared for came up for him, their names, and he was kept by the names and the faces of these people from going again to the litany of nothings. He wanted care in his life. He exhibited care. He was capable of it. Fucking care. He was smiling again, so tired. It has been a long day and he’d been careful in it. Something good had happened, he knew, more than one thing really, and he had it in his pocket. The steward came by with her big silver bracelet and brought him more coffee much too late on a Friday night for coffee, but of course. He’s typing on a plane, drinking coffee and the woman was somewhere safe and sound. That was all he needed to know. Oh, my heck, the woman. He was now thinking of the woman in her pajamas in her yellow sheets sleeping and now his smile was the real smile, the one that fit his face like a sunset. He was on a plane again, and though it felt so fucking much like the end of something in his fatigue, he knew with true gravity that everything would be all right.

  POLAND

  Stories

  Natasza Goerke

  STORY #1, “BREAKUP”: I broke up.

  Story #2, “Memory”: I remembered.

  Story #3, “The Comeback”: I came back.

  And so on.

  The stories are short, but concise. No need to scrutinize them. The final sentence is contained in the first. Saves all sorts of time. Who cares about the rest. All that paper in between. There’s one for everyone. Narratives, inventories, notes. Read it ages ago.

  And the fact that I was breaking up? That I remembered? That I was on my way back? Who hasn’t heard it all before! A label is enough: an abbreviation, a title, any old crap, and all at once it all comes back.

  Remembers. Breaks up.

  Whoever doesn’t get th
is, he’ll never figure it out. No matter how he scrutinizes it. All those sheets of paper in between. He won’t figure out what it means. To break up, to remember, to come back. And so on.

  Translated by W. Martin

  FLASH

  THEORY

  O the great God of Theory, he’s just a pencil stub, a chewed stub with a worn eraser at the end of a huge scribble.

  Charles Simic

  I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish; the microstory to an insect (iridescent in the best cases).

  Luisa Valenzuela

  I think of flash fiction, or the short short, as being more like a painting than like long fiction. The ambition of a short short is not to make readers “lose themselves”—how far lost can you get in a couple of pages?

  Deb Olin Unferth

  I am, on the whole, a person of few words. I studied in a convent in Karachi where the nuns said, “Economy in everything, including words.”

  Talat Abbasi

  Why these things, now? Well, who is notable for making plans anymore? Who feels like the hero of an epic? These are tunes for the end of time, for those in an information age who are sick of data.

  Charles Baxter

  Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness.

  Irving Howe

  “Parting”

  “Quick—a story! The bus is leaving!” she said. And so it was: the air brakes released like my will to stand gone faint. But I trotted along beside the open slash of window, into the wet street. I worked at the idea for a story as I ran faster. It would have to be good, and it would have to matter. I was on the verge of something when the bus got its second wind, suddenly, and I knew that the chorus of its pistons would rise above me. All I could do was position myself in the middle of the street, in newly-aged September light—hoping to be framed squarely by the black window of the bus. A small figure, with story.

  Daryl Scroggins

  Good one-page fictions have a spiral construction: the words circle out from a dense, packed core, and the spiral moves through the words, past the boundary of the page. That limitless quality could be said to apply to great fiction of any length, but the realized one-page fiction must move palpably beyond the page, like a ghost self . . . The one-page fiction should hang in the air of the mind like an image made of smoke.

  Jayne Anne Phillips

  THE APPEAL OF FLASH

  What I love about exceptionally brief stories is the way that they often bring me to a point of recognition in a paragraph or two, and then leave me there, absolutely suspended. There is no gentle letdown, no winding down, no expulsion of air—just that wonderful moment.

  Dinty W. Moore

  Why are miniature things so compelling? . . .

  The miniature is mysterious . . . .

  Miniatures encourage attention . . . .

  Miniatures are intimate . . . .

  Time, in miniature form, like a gas compressed, gets hotter.

  Lia Purpura

  The flame of complete combustion has a blue tinge. It is a beautiful color; it is a ferocious color. A piece of writing is powerful if its words are “completely combusted.”

  Chen Yizhi

  Brevity is the face of mortality. No one blathers at the edge of the grave, except clergymen (and some writers), whose minds are on immortality, which gives them more time because it’s presumed to go on forever—just as they often seem to.

  Alvin Greenberg

  Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.

  Last Words of Pancho Villa

  THE ESSENTIALS OF FLASH

  It is condensed, even curt; its rhythms are fleeting, its languor quick, its majesty diminutive. It discredits accretions, honors reduction, and refuses to ramble. Its identity is exceptional, its appetite exclusive. It is refractory, rapid, runtish. It reverses, refutes, revises. It can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred. It covers years in less time, time in almost no time. It wants to deliver us where we were before we began. Its aim is restorative, to keep us young. It thrives on self-effacement, and generates statements, on its own behalf, that are shorn or short. Its end is erasure.

  Mark Strand

  “God is in the details.” Flaubert’s aphorism is often recalled when speaking about microhistory, the intensive historical investigation of a small area . . . .

  Similarly to classical Greek plays, where we can find a threefold unity of place, time and action, the microhistorical approach creates a focal point, and in this focus the subject of the historical investigation can be studied with an intensity unparalleled in studies about nations, states or social groupings, stretching over decades, centuries or whatever longue durée.

  István Szijártó

  Very short fictions are nearly always experimental, exquisitely calibrated, reminiscent of Frost’s definition of a poem—a structure of words that consumes itself as it unfolds, like ice melting on a stove . . . .

  There are those for whom one of Chopin’s brilliant little Preludes is worth an entire symphony by one or another “classic” composer whose method is to build upon repetition and contrast.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  It’s its own self, and it’s intrinsically different from the short story and more like the sonnet or ghazal—two quick moves in opposite directions, dialectical moves, perhaps, and then a leap to a radical resolution that leaves the reader anxious in a particularly satisfying way. The source, the need, for the form seems to me to be the same need that created Norse kennings, Zen koans, Sufi tales, where language and metaphysics grapple for holds like Greek wrestlers, and not the need that created the novel or the short story, even, where language and the social sciences sleep peacefully inside one another like bourgeois spoons.

  Russell Banks

  For me, a very short story should do four basic things: obviously it should tell a story; it should be entertaining; it should be thought-provoking; and, if done well enough, it should invoke an emotional response.

  Robert Swartwood

  FLASH FICTION OR PROSE POETRY?

  I never understood the debate about flash fiction: Is it a story; is it a poem? It isn’t a poem because the author doesn’t want it to be a poem. When a poet writes a prose poem and says, “This is a prose poem,” everyone says okay and that’s that. But when a flash fiction writer says, “This is a story,” there’s often a collective stomping of brakes on the writing highway as naysayers screech to a halt to gauge its storyness. Don’t be afraid, I want to tell those naysayers. It’s just a little story. Like a long story, but shorter.

  Sherrie Flick

  The truth is people are kind of scared by very very short stories—just as they are by long poems.

  A short story is closer to the poem than to the novel (I’ve said that a million times) and when it’s very very short—1, 2, 2½ pages—should be read like a poem. That is slowly. People who like to skip can’t skip in a 3-page story.

  Grace Paley

  For me, the difference between a flash fiction and a prose poem of similar length is in its treatment of time via the sentence. A flash fiction, however dense and lyrical, operates (like any fiction) through cause-effect, action and consequence, and so even when it engages memory it treats time as moving forward with the sentence. The prose poem, like the lyric poem, is recursive in nature, not because of but despite the fact that the sentence is its central unit. Lacking the line, which inherently retards time, it finds other ways to frustrate the momentum of the sentence, and through that frustration it opens into the swiftly dilating but not forward-moving lyric moment.

  Katharine Coles

  On the Time Difference

  Between Poetry and Prose

  The wall clock read one minute after midnight. A poet and a writer met. “My muse,” said the writer, “has deserted me.” The poet responded, “So write about it.” The writer wept softly. “And s
he is with someone else right now.” The poet said, “So write about it.” The writer said, “But I suspect that he has blue eyes.” “So write about it,” the poet advised, “or just beat him up.” “Maybe she didn’t love me,” said the writer. “Yes, maybe she never loved me.” The poet said, “So write about it. Or beat him up. Is he strong?” “I didn’t say that he was strong,” objected the writer, “I said that he had blue eyes.” “So write about it.” “Tell me, what is it that you want from me?” shouted the writer, “you write about it.” The poet said with surprise, “Why suggest that I write?” “Because you suggested it to me,” answered the writer. “You advised me to write.” “I didn’t advise you to do anything,” said the poet, shrugging. “What do you mean—you suggested it. Five times.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “About my muse leaving me . . .” “So write about it . . .” “You see, again you . . .” The writer jumped up, tore the clock from the wall and struck the poet with all his might. The time was three minutes after midnight.