Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories Read online

  Edited By

  James Thomas

  Denise Thomas

  Tom Hazuka

  NEW YORK • 1992

  Copyright ©1992

  by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  The text of this book is composed in Weiss with the display set in Serif Gothic Bold Composition

  by PennSet, Inc.

  Manufacturing by Courier Companies, Inc.

  Book design by Charlotte Staub

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Flash fiction : very short stories / edited by James Thomas,

  Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka

  p. cm.

  1. Short stories, American I. Thomas, James

  II. Thomas, Denise III. Hazuka, Tom

  PS648.S5F58 1992

  813'.0108—dc20 91-42347

  ISBN 0-393-03361-9 (cl)

  ISBN 0-393-30883-9 (pa)

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by James Thomas

  1. SPENCER HOLST: Brilliant Silence

  2. FRANCINE PROSE: Pumpkins

  3. RICHARD SHELTON: The Stones

  4. JOANNA H. WOŚ: The One Sitting There

  5. DAN O’BRIEN: Crossing Spider Creek

  6. ALLEN WOODMAN: The Lampshade Vendor

  7. WILLIAM HEYEN: Roseville

  8. LEX WILLIFORD: Pendergast’s Daughter

  9. KENT THOMPSON: Ponderosa

  10. STUART DYBEK: Gold Coast

  11. LARRY FRENCH: Mr. Mumsford

  12. ADRIENNE CLASKY: From the Floodlands

  13. ALLAN GURGANUS: A Public Denial

  14. CAROL EDELSTEIN: 232-9979

  15. RAYMOND CARVER: The Father

  16. LON OTTO: Love Poems

  17. BRET LOTT: Night

  18. KRISTIN ANDRYCHUK: Mandy Shupe

  19. TOM HAWKINS: Wedding Night

  20. BRUCE EASON: The Appalachian Trail

  21. RUSSELL EDSON: Dinner Time

  22. LUISA VALENZUELA: Vision Out of the Corner of One Eye

  23. PAMELA PAINTER: I Get Smart

  24. DON SHEA: True Love

  25. CAROLYN FORCHÉ: The Colonel

  26. JULIA ALVAREZ: Snow

  27. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Everything Is Green

  28. MICHAEL DELP: Draft Horse

  29. RICHARD BRAUTIGAN: Corporal

  30. GREGORY BURNHAM: Subtotals

  31. GARY GILDNER: Fingers

  32. JO SAPP: Nadine at 35. A Synopsis

  33. ROLAND TOPOR: Feeding the Hungry

  34. MICHAEL MARTONE: Dish Night

  35. WILL BAKER: Grace Period

  36. MARY MORRIS: The Haircut

  37. KENNETH BERNARD: Vines

  38. ROD KESSLER: How to Touch a Bleeding Dog

  39. JAMAICA KINCAID: Girl

  40. BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS: The Burlington Northern, Southbound

  41. HEINRICH BÖLL: The Cage

  42. ROBERT HILL LONG: The Restraints

  43. ELLEN HUNNICUTT: Blackberries

  44. JULIO CORTÁZAR: A Continuity of Parks

  45. MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: The Paring Knife

  46. JOHN UPDIKE: The Widow

  47. JIM HEYNEN: What Happened during the Ice Storm

  48. K.C. FREDERICK: Teddy’s Canary

  49. CHUCK ROSENTHAL: The Nicest Kid in the Universe

  50. KELLY CHERRY: The Parents

  51. FRED LEEBRON: Water

  52. TIM O’BRIEN: Stockings

  53. BERNARD COOPER: The Hurricane Ride

  54. WILLIAM BROHAUGH: A Moment in the Sun Field

  55. SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS: The Philosophical Cobbler

  56. SHEILA BARRY: Corners

  57. MARK STRAND: Space

  58. GORDON LISH: Fear: Four Examples

  59. KATE MCCORKLE: The Last Parakeet

  60. PAUL LISICKY: Snapshot, Harry Ceders: 1948

  61. JOYCE CAROL OATES: August Evening

  62. MARY DILWORTH: The Factory

  63. FRANÇOIS CAMOIN: The Sewers of Salt Lake

  64. STEVEN MOLEN: Jane

  65. MARLENE BUONO: Offerings

  66. MARGARET ATWOOD: Bread

  67. RONALD WALLACE: Yogurt

  68. PAVAO PAVLICIĆ: A Chronicler’s Sin

  69. S. FRIEDMAN: Here

  70. DIANE WILLIAMS: Here’s Another Ending

  71. MARK HALLIDAY: 108 John Street

  72. LARRY FONDATION: Deportation at Breakfast

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts at Wright State University for their generous support, to the many students at Wright State who helped in the selection of these stories, and to Chris Merrill, Carol Houck Smith, and Nat Sobel for their time and advice.

  For Steve Molen

  • In Memoriam •

  His life story

  was far too short

  How short can a story be and still truly be a story? This book attempts to provide a collective response to that question, although any answer, surely, will remain subjective. How short is very? Hemingway’s wonderful (and classic) “A Very Short Story” is about 750 words, and none of the stories here is much longer than that. Nor do any of the stories included in this anthology run less than 250 words, the diminutive limit that Jerome Stern has put to his “World’s Best Short-Short Story” competition, the winners of which appear each fall in Sundog: The Southeast Review.

  Why Flash Fiction as opposed to Sudden Fiction, which we have featured in two previous books? Answer: We did want to make a distinction between the two types of stories. The stories here are shorter (in terms of “limit”) by a full thousand words than the stories in those books, and quantitatively there is a big difference between 1,750 words and 750 words. In terms of quality, however, we would maintain that the stories here are as fully dimensional and wholly complete as the Sudden stories. Like all fiction that matters, their success depends not on their length but on their depth, their clarity of vision, their human significance—the extent to which the reader is able to recognize in them the real stuff of real life.

  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-pag
e 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

  BRILLIANT SILENCE

  Two 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?

  PUMPKINS

  There 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 safe
ty, 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.

  THE STONES

  I love to go out on summer nights and watch the stones grow. I think they grow better here in the desert, where it is warm and dry, than almost anywhere else. Or perhaps it is only that the young ones are more active here.

  Young stones tend to move about more than their elders consider good for them. Most young stones have a secret desire which their parents had before them but have forgotten ages ago. And because this desire involves water, it is never mentioned. The older stones disapprove of water and say, “Water is a gadfly who never stays in one place long enough to learn anything.” But the young stones try to work themselves into a position, slowly and without their elders noticing it, in which a sizable stream of water during a summer storm might catch them broadside and unknowing, so to speak, and push them along over a slope or down an arroyo. In spite of the danger this involves, they want to travel and see something of the world and settle in a new place, far from home, where they can raise their own dynasties away from the domination of their parents.

  And although family ties are very strong among stones, many of the more daring young ones have succeeded, and they carry scars to prove to their children that they once went on a journey, helter-skelter and high water, and traveled perhaps fifteen feet, an incredible distance. As they grow older, they cease to brag about such clandestine adventures.

  It is true that old stones get to be very conservative. They consider all movement either dangerous or downright sinful. They remain comfortable where they are and often get fat. Fatness, as a matter of fact, is a mark of distinction.