Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“An intelligent person can rationalize anything, a wise person doesn't try.”
― Jen Knox, Chaos Magic

“The sea loved the moon
When she was supposed to love the shore.

The moon knew
And hence made his intentions known.

That she should love the shore
Who was destined for her.

Yet his protests seemed weak.
And even when he pushed her towards the shore-
She always retreated back.

To want, to need, to love the moon
For all she's worth.

Everyone said, it wasn't meant to happen.
Yet, the Tsunami rose that night for their union.”
― Saiber, Stardust and Sheets

“Love enters later in life through the cracks left by the first heartbreak.”
― D. Biswas, A to Z Stories of Life and Death

“Day 72


I remember oranges and you don’t mind me leaving the queue momentarily to find some. When you say, Of course, you reach for my arm in sympathy and recognition. This may be the thing that breaks me today, that stops me in my tracks before driving me forward, turning a corner, making something work, letting everything happen. When I return, you’re touching my yoghurts, reading the ingredients, as though you are making them yours, protecting them in my absence and amusing yourself with the cherry-ness of them. On days like this, I want to take my strangers home with me.”
― Gemma Seltzer, Speak to Strangers

“Let's press ahead a little further by sketching out a few variations among short shorts:

ONE THRUST OF INCIDENT. (Examples: Paz,
Mishima, Shalamov, Babel, W. C. Williams.) In these short shorts the time span is extremely brief, a few hours, maybe even a few minutes: Life is grasped in symbolic compression. One might say that these short shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been tom out of their contexts. You have to supply the contexts yourself, since if the contexts were there, they'd no longer be short shorts.

LIFE ROLLED UP. (Examples: Tolstoy's 'Alyosha the Pot,' Verga's 'The Wolf,' D. H. Lawrence's 'A Sick Collier.') In these you get the illusion of sustained narrative, since they deal with lives over an extended period of time; but actually these lives are so compressed into typicality and paradigm, the result seems very much like a single incident. Verga's 'Wolf' cannot but repeat her passions, Tolstoy's Alyosha his passivity. Themes of obsession work especially well in this kind of short short.

SNAP-SHOT OR SINGLE FRAME. (Examples: Garda Marquez, Boll, Katherine Anne Porter.) In these we have no depicted event or incident, only an interior monologue or flow of memory. A voice speaks, as it were, into the air. A mind is revealed in cross-section - and the cut is rapid. One would guess that this is the hardest kind of short short to write: There are many pitfalls such as tiresome repetition, being locked into a single voice, etc.

LIKE A FABLE. (Examples: Kafka, Keller, von Kleist, Tolstoy's 'Three Hermits.') Through its very concision, this kind of short short moves past realism. We are prodded into the fabulous, the strange, the spooky. To write this kind of fable-like short short, the writer needs a supreme self-confidence: The net of illusion can be cast only once. When we read such fable-like miniatures, we are prompted to speculate about significance, teased into shadowy parallels or semi allegories. There are also, however, some fables so beautifully complete (for instance Kafka's 'First Sorrow') that we find ourselves entirely content with the portrayed surface and may even take a certain pleasure in refusing interpretation.

("Introduction")”
― Irving Howe, Short Shorts

“The usual short story cannot have a complex plot, but it often has a simple one resembling a chain with two or three links. The short short, however, doesn't as a rule have even that much - you don't speak of a chain when there's only one link. ...

Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

Everything depends on intensity, one sweeping blow of perception. In the short short the writer gets no second chance. Either he strikes through at once or he's lost. And because it depends so heavily on this one sweeping blow, the short short often approaches the condition of a fable. When you read the two pieces by Tolstoy in this book, or I.L. Peretz's 'If Not Higher,' or Franz Kafka's 'The Hunter Gracchus,' you feel these writers are intent upon 'making a point' - but obliquely, not through mere statement. What they project is not the sort of impression of life we expect in most fiction, but something else: an impression of an idea of life. Or: a flicker in darkness, a slight cut of being. The shorter the piece of writing, the more abstract it may seem to us. In reading Paz's brilliant short short we feel we have brushed dangerously against the sheer arbitrariness of existence; in reading Peretz's, that we have been brought up against a moral reflection on the nature of goodness, though a reflection hard merely to state.

Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ...

Writers who do short shorts need to be especially bold. They stake everything on a stroke of inventiveness. Sometimes they have to be prepared to speak out directly, not so much in order to state a theme as to provide a jarring or complicating commentary. The voice of the writer brushes, so to say, against his flash of invention. And then, almost before it begins, the fiction is brought to a stark conclusion - abrupt, bleeding, exhausting. This conclusion need not complete the action; it has only to break it off decisively.

Here are a few examples of the writer speaking out directly. Paz: 'The universe is a vast system of signs.' Kafka in 'First Sorrow': The trapeze artist's 'social life was somewhat limited.' Paula Fox: 'We are starving here in our village. At last, we are at the center.' Babel's cossack cries out, 'You guys in specs have about as much pity for chaps like us as a cat for a mouse.' Such sentences serve as devices of economy, oblique cues. Cryptic and enigmatic, they sometimes replace action, dialogue and commentary, for none of which, as it happens, the short short has much room.

There's often a brilliant overfocussing.

("Introduction")”
― Irving Howe, Short Shorts

“Each day Marda gets closer. The sub circles coral reefs off the coasts, where mermaids are said to like the colors of the schools of fishes, and train them to swim around their necks like jewelry or live behind their ears, beneath their long hair. Sometimes mermaids like shallow places, but mostly they like the dark and the beautiful, uncharted, abandoned, soulless parts of the undiscovered world.”
― Holly Walrath, Pulp Literature Issue 7 Summer 2015

“THE STAGE:
The stage is empty, and you watch as the figure of Medusa steps into the gas-light. Her body is dressed in a crimson traversed by the golden branches of willow trees, colour and light held into shape by sharp black borders. Lifting languidly her hands, she reaches towards you. Her emerald vipers, in the cohesive movements of unseen mechanisms, weave loops about her head. Music is beginning, and from the shadows off-stage the narrator speaks. “Medusa had a beautiful name and a lovely voice, though no one cared to listen; seeking only the gaze of those famous eyes.�
Perseus walks onto the stage, cloaked as though he were the blazing sun. Now what you have to understand is his voice â€� it is like nothing you could tie down. It feels peaceful to hear it, to see him flow into the song with his fine, clear looks and his finer, clearer voice. Is the head quite forgotten? Not quite but the horror exists alongside the beauty and they flow like twin rivers, and neither is able to wash the other from you.”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“So when she looked in the mirror one day, and saw the beginning of thorny protrusions on her legs, a slight greenish tinge to her skin, she sighed.

It was inevitable. - The Monster In Her Bedroom, Havok Magazine, Issue 1.1”
― Katherine Valdez

“She'd fall back asleep dreaming of hurricanes whipping the palm trees around her childhood home, trying to run from the Godzilla-sized beast that rushed to devour her. But her feet were stuck in invisible cement. As she struggled to scream, she'd startle awake and feel the staccato beats of her heart thumping double-time.

Only then would she remember: she brought him into this world.

- The Monster In Her Bedroom, Havok Magazine, Issue 1.1”
― Katherine Valdez

“The day their love died, so did an unsuspecting duck.”
― Racha Mourtada, 55 slightly sinister stories

“Y cuando todas las ratas estuvieron dentro de al caja, Hamelín apagó el televisor”
― Juan Jacinto Muñoz Rengel, El libro de los pequeños milagros

“When life expectancy hit 95 years of age, married people around the world shouted, "Enough!" And just like that, the institution of marriage was reinvented.”
― Katherine Valdez, Baby Shoes: 100 Stories by 100 Authors

“A dessert to a deserter in the desert burst, "You trust your thirst. And you are too hot! You scream for ice cream. And believe it or not, I may not be your first. But I might be your lust! Give it a shot...”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, One Hundred One World Accounts in One Hundred One Word Count

“Aw honey. Today's as important as forever." Grandpa Joe in "Shave and a Haircut" Flash Warden and Other Stories”
― Eileen Granfors

“Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty storeys tall, rise out of the ground like trees.”
― Justin Ker, The Space Between the Raindrops

“Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys.”
― Justin Ker, The Space Between the Raindrops

“Write. Edit. Repeat.”
― Miles White

“Dunce is completely bald and has a really pointed head so the temptation to get him paralytic on his thirtieth birthday, carry him to the tattooist’s and get a nice big ‘Dâ€� smack bang in the middle of his forehead was too much for me. Trouble is he can’t afford to have it removed so he wears a big plaster over it. Gangs of children tease him.

‘What’s underneath the plaster, mister? Show us!�

They swear he has a third eye under there.

My name is Bill but Dunce calls me ‘Fezâ€� on account of my hat. I’ve known Dunce for over sixteen years.”
― Mike Russell, Nothing Is Strange

“Hello. It is Monday. I live in Sun City. Sun City is a city that is entirely contained inside an enormous concrete building in the shape of a sun. Its rays house our living quarters; its circular centre is where we work and shop. No one has ever been outside of the city; it is generally suspected that the environment outside of the city is uninhabitable.”
― Mike Russell, Nothing Is Strange

“I haven't told my grandma about you. I'm afraid because I think she'll want me to be only one thing, a lesbian or just don't bring it up!”
― Amanda K. Davidson, The Sissy Goes for a Swim

“A sister dovetails into a sister. Under steady state conditions, a sister can’t pinpoint the endpoint between her brain and her sister’s: a flow of speech runs in a loop.”
― Amanda K. Davidson, The Sissy Goes for a Swim

“A tale within a Tweet, how sweet!!”
― Neil Leckman

“Flash, copy transcribed from Word Yahoo email

Q Q Winner Flash Fiction Contest Diversicon 27 (2019) by Scott E. Shjefte


“THE NEXT STEP�

Flatness, extended flatness, boring endless, on and on, forever� Roundness, I think, I am round. Rolling, I can. Energy found from within and great joy to roll. Roll to the end of Flatness. Sense of self, I can PING!. PING< PING< PING< Hear the ping of my sphere! I am sphere - the flatness extends, as I roll. Roll is great but much sameness everywhere. Destiny to explore, discover. Then a vertical cylinder I ping. It ‘pings� back with great sadness, standing proud but motionless. It pings to me, I am joyed to find another! Cylinder is sad that it can not roll, cylinder is envious of ME! I touch, we touch, contact is blissful. I am not alone! I push, and push and cylinder falls over. Cylinder is joyful, Cylinder can roll! Great joy to roll together, and roll, and roll. We roll long and far and then ping a pyramid. Pyramid envies our rolling travels. I push the pyramid but just go up its side. Strange to leave upward from the flatness. I back down and away from the pyramid. I gather my energies, I move faster than I ever have towards the pyramid, I roll up its side and off the top outward pinging ever outward, higher and I Ping now that the flatness is curved and a new adventure ever outward, this next step is an ORBITAL LEAP!


by Sesame”
― Scott Edward Shjefte

“The security guard asked me what I was doing in the park at 2am. I told him I was burying a body.
He didn’t seem happy with that.
He was so unhappy that he reached for his gun and his walkie-talkie at the same time. This was his undoing. He never saw the shovel coming.
Now one more body cluttered the landscaped lawn.
I hoped I had enough lime to cover both of them. I’d found the instructions online. Same place as the instructions on how to make your own zombie.
Those hadn’t worked.
But the night was still young.”
― John West, Tales from the Crying Room - 3 twisted short stories, 20 short short stories, and a play

“Perhaps it’s the devil in me—or the witch, the whore, and the girl—or maybe I’m just lazy, but even talking about this holy work ethic makes me want to don the shortest short-shorts I can find and run through the stacks of the library, shrieking.

from: The Excess of the Short-Short, SmokeLongQuarterly”
― Rachel Levy

“Writing it down is the opposite of covering it up.”
― Gina Barreca, Fast Fallen Women: 75 Essays of Flash NonFiction

“All good writing reflects and illuminates life; Fast Fallen Women holds up a compact mirror. You might well see yourself.”
― Gina Barreca, Fast Fallen Women: 75 Essays of Flash NonFiction

“Culpa" may mean "fall," but implies responsibility. A culpable woman is a capable woman, and an admission of guilt is the price of admission into a life of free will.”
― Gina Barreca, Fast Fallen Women: 75 Essays of Flash NonFiction

“Once upon a time in the east, there was a spider who moved to the west.”
― Angelina Souren, FCQ