Brave

Marvel Studios / Paramount Pictures

Yesterday, on the bus, someone looking (and sounding) like Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko sat behind me. As he stood up to leave, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked for directions to the police station.
      'It's over there,' I replied, pointing out of the window.
      Expressing his gratitude in a slightly over-effusive Slavic manner, he offered me his hand to shake; a provocative gesture in present circumstances. It felt like a challenge that one was obliged to accept.  

      'I like you,' he said. 'You don't wear mask and are not afraid like these other idiots. You are a brave man, like me.'

      

Stephen Alexander (May 2020)

This post is part of the Adventures on the 174 project. 

 

Baby Shoes (A Brief Note on Flash Fiction)

Image via id-iom on flickr [1]

Flash fiction is a literary genre defined by its brevity that divides into subcategories based on word count; for example, the dribble is a work of 50 words, whilst the drabble is twice the length.

For those who, like me, love all forms of fragmented writing - including aphorisms, epigrams, haiku and micro-blogging - flash fiction possesses a unique quality of suggestion that isn't always present in longer tales where characters and stories are more fully developed.

It's not that less is more, but that less hints at so much more than the material on the page and teases with infinite possibility. In other words, flash fiction is a kind of virtual genre played upon the actual surface of language. I'm tempted to also suggest that flash fiction can be thought of in the same way that D. H. Lawrence conceives the poetry of the present:

"In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. [...] The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. [...]
      There is poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry [...] whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit." [2]

This poetry of the present is, like flash fiction, radically different (not just in form) from more carefully considered and constructed work; "there is no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened" [3]. There is, rather, just the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment.

In sum: flash fiction, at its best, helps set us free and if there is something a little discordant and unsatisying about it, well, these qualities also belong to life ...

Notes

[1] Ernest Hemingway, who included 18 pieces of flash fiction in his first short-story collection, In Our Time (1925), is also believed (probably wrongly) to have written this tragic six-word tale of unworn baby shoes for sale. 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Preface to New Poems', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 1, pp. 646-47. 

[3] Ibid., p. 647.