Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (2 page)

But less
can
sometimes be more, we think, the meaningful glance more consequential than the long (but less intense, less informed) look or stare. These stories are not tricks, or trills on a flute; rather they are very short stage presentations or musical pieces that play to the full range of human sensibilities—some evoke mood while others provoke the intellect, some introduce us to people were interested to meet, while others tell us of unusual but understandable phenomena in this world, and some of them do several or all of these things, the things good fiction of any length does.

One of our original ideas for the book was to present stories that could be read without turning a page, assuming that there might be some difference in the way we read stories when we can actually
see
beginning and end at the same time. So, envisioning a story on a two-page spread, 750 words seemed about tops for conventional, readable typography. Enthusiastically, we began searching for such stories, and called them “flash” fictions because there would be no enforced pause in the readers concentration, no break in the field of vision. They would be apprehended “all at once.”

Over a period of three years we found them, thousands of them, hundreds of which we asked our literary friends and my writing students at Wright State University to read. We asked them to read them and rate them (on a score of one to ten), stirred in our own “scores” and when it came time we delivered these seventy-two stories to the publisher, saying, “remember, one story to a page (or a two-page spread), just a little book of little stories.” What we hadn’t anticipated was the physical monotony of such a book
design
, story page after story page, and what we hadn’t accounted for was the obvious, if illusory, notion that as readers we expect and
like
to turn pages. Turning pages, it would seem, is part of what fiction is about, part of the passing of the story.

We therefore adjusted our vision (but kept the title) and allowed the stories to begin and to end, to proceed through the book, in a more natural and conventional way. Now what we read before we turn the page has the effect of allowing the story to ascend, to gain altitude, you might say, before seeing and therefore anticipating the landing strip.

The minimal and rapid trajectory is of course much of the appeal (and challenge) of these stories—but it is interesting to note that that public taste for brevity in fiction has fluctuated over the years. Fifty years ago very short stories could be found in such magazines as
Liberty
, but fifteen years ago it was most unusual to come across a story of under five pages in the respected magazines and literary journals of this country. It’s hard to know whether writers fifteen years ago weren’t writing these stories or editors simply weren’t accepting them for publication, but I’m inclined to think (as both an editor and a writer at that time) that editors were declining to publish very short fictions, considering them “slight,” if not whimsical. Then writers like Raymond Carver and Joyce Carol Oates started producing them, literary magazines like
The North American Review
started printing them, and by the end of the eighties the form (which at two thousand words we’ve called “sudden fiction”) had a fervent following and was being widely published. Now,
very
short pieces, under a thousand words, have been appearing with greater frequency, and we can only wonder, as we introduce you to the stories in this volume—welcome, welcome, welcome, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy—whether “flash fiction” will be an avid endeavor of the present literary generation.

It is a distinct pleasure to wonder about this with you, students of fiction all of us, and to present to you these stories along with the question, “How short can a story be and . . . ?”

—James Thomas

B
RILLIANT
S
ILENCE

T
wo Alaskan Kodiak bears joined a small circus where the pair appeared in a nightly parade pulling a covered wagon. The two were taught to somersault, to spin, to stand on their heads, and to dance on their hind legs, paw in paw, stepping in unison. Under a spotlight the dancing bears, a male and a female, soon became favorites of the crowd. The circus went south on a west coast tour through Canada to California and on down into Mexico, through Panama into South America, down the Andes the length of Chile to those southernmost isles of Tierra del Fuego. There a jaguar jumped the juggler, and afterwards, mortally mauled the animal trainer; and the shocked showpeople disbanded in dismay and horror. In the confusion the bears went their own way. Without a master, they wandered off by themselves into the wilderness on those densely wooded, wildly windy, subantarctic islands. Utterly away from people, on an out-of-the-way uninhabited island, and in a climate they found ideal, the bears mated, thrived, multiplied, and after a number of generations populated the entire island. Indeed, after some years, descendants of the two moved out onto half a dozen adjacent islands, and seventy years later, when scientists finally found and enthusiastically studied the bears, it was discovered that all of them, to a bear, were performing splendid circus tricks.

On nights when the sky is bright and the moon is full, they gather to dance. They gather the cubs and the juveniles in a circle around them. They gather together out of the wind at the center of a sparkling, circular crater left by a meteorite which had fallen in a bed of chalk. Its glassy walls are chalk white, its flat floor is covered with white gravel, and it is well-drained, and dry. No vegetation grows within. When the moon rises above it, the light reflecting off the walls fills the crater with a pool of moonlight, so that it is twice as bright on the crater floor as anywhere else in that vicinity. Scientists speculate that originally the full moon had reminded the two bears of the circus spotlight, and for that reason they danced. Yet, it might be asked, what music do the descendants dance to?

Paw in paw, stepping in unison . . . what music can they possibly hear inside their heads as they dance under the full moon and the Aurora Australis, as they dance in brilliant silence?

P
UMPKINS

T
here is a terrible accident. A truck full of Halloween pumpkins is speeding around a curve and fails to see another car unwisely making a U-turn. In the car is a young woman, married, the mother of three, who, when the vehicles collide, is killed.

Actually, she is beheaded, her body thrown from the car and decapitated with such force that the head sails through the air and lands in a pile of pumpkins spilled out onto the road.

Her husband is spared this detail until the next day, when it appears in a front page story in the local paper.

This newspaper is bought by a woman about to leave home on a trip. The tragedy so unhinges her that she rushes off the train and calls her husband at work. When she mentions the pumpkin-truck accident, he says, Pumpkin-truck accident? precisely like their five-year-old son saying, Bubble gum on the couch?

The woman begins to tremble, realizing now what she should have realized (and because she is in therapy, she thinks, she
did
realize, no wonder she was upset!). The accident occurred more or less exactly in front of the house of a woman with whom her husband had a love affair but has promised he has stopped seeing.

She senses that her husband knows about this accident—and not from reading the newspaper. That is why he sounds guilty. Perhaps he was with his lover when it happened, perhaps this woman called him for comfort, just as she is calling him now. As she confronts him with this, her husband keeps interrupting to answer questions at his office.

The next morning the woman sees her therapist on an emergency basis. She tells him the whole story, from buying the paper and reading about the pumpkin-truck to calling her husband to her husband moving out again last night.

The therapist says he is sorry; he cannot talk about this. He tells her that, coincidentally, one of his patients is the husband of the woman killed by the pumpkin-truck. It is, after all, a small town. The therapist says he has been dealing with this tragedy for two days—on a
real
crisis basis, a
real
emergency basis—and frankly he cannot stand to hear it treated as another subplot in this woman’s continuing romantic imbroglio.

The woman bursts into tears. The therapist apologizes for his unprofessional behavior; he says the whole thing has unnerved him in ways even he doesn’t understand.

That night the therapist tells his wife about this. For ethical reasons he leaves out the names. Still, he repeats what the woman told him and what he said and what happened.

Except that this time, instead of saying “pumpkins,” he says “Christmas trees.”

“Christmas trees?” says his wife.

“Did I say Christmas trees?” he says. “How funny. I meant pumpkins.” Naturally he realizes that this slip of the tongue is a clue to why this incident so disturbs him.

Later, in bed, he considers his mistake. And before long it comes to him. Because for once the truth is not submerged, but bobs on the surface, like a buoy, tied to a time he often revisits in looking back on his life.

At five he suffered a case of mumps which turned into something more serious. He remembers running to his parents’ room, his cheeks swinging like sacks of flesh from his face. He remembers falling. After that he was sick for months—from autumn through early winter. The symbolism is so obvious: pumpkin time when he became ill, Christmas when he recovered.

Now his wife gets into bed, but he doesn’t notice. For he is feeling, as never before, how much of his life has passed: all the years that separate him from that swollen-faced boy. He thinks how sweet that period was, the rhythm of those days, sleep, radio, chilled canned pears, the kingdom of the blanket, the kingdom of ice outside it.

For an instant he nearly recaptures that haze of safety, confusion and boredom, when he fell asleep looking at pumpkins and awoke seeing a Christmas tree, when nothing scared him, not even time, it was all being taken care of. Then it recedes like the plots of dreams he wakes up already forgetting.

It is like the experience of speeding along a highway, and some broken sign or ruined café will suddenly recall his past, but before he can tell his wife, they have already driven by. He knows that if he turns and goes back, what caught his eye will have vanished—though perhaps he may catch a glimpse of it, fleeing from him down the road.