- Concerning
the History of the Genre:
Jesus woke. He ate three herring, drank a mug (big-ass wooden one his dad made. Like a souvenir stadium
cup) of potent wine, then strolled about Galilee. The sky that day resembled the
cotton from an asthma inhaler, and the winds sewed, weaved, and knitted the
sand into one enormous Jupiter-ass sirocco, but most of this irrelevant, unless
you just like weather. These days it seems everyone is into the weather. Probably
something to do with control, mortality, or the absolute unpredictability of a
tornado, of illness, a relationship, you know, like maybe your girlfriend an
hour late, another hour (no phone call, no text), another, then gone. As usual, crowds blossomed. As
usual, people started pestering Jesus with questions. A young man asked about
virgin versus extra virgin olive oil. One woman didn’t want to sell all her
earthly belongings, period. Was there another way? One man with a head like a luffa
gourd wanted Jesus’s opinion on his wayward friend. His friend was doing low motels,
bad drugs, rangy men, all that pitiful and scrambling way. “Should I hang out
with this woman anymore? I mean she sins like fish swim,” the man said to
Jesus.
Jesus told him a story about a
lost sheep.
Buddha would have told him a
koan about the Lost Son. Or maybe even the Canary and the Benevolent Rat. They
both end the same.
Allah has this one about the
engineering of a spider’s house.
(“Nothing.” He cleared his
throat. “It’s just that I want to hear your voice.”)
Most everyone tells the one
about the coyote, or they might throw in the Universal Question: “Why does
Batman have a dog?”
On and on….I guess I aim to
prove flash fiction is not just here,
but been here. Example: In 1984, two
Syrian friends of mine who happen to do a lot of digging in their line of work
(irrelevant here, the exact nature of their business) stumbled upon two stone
tablets along the Euphrates River. Etched upon the stones were several symbols and
a series of hash marks. My friends took these tablets to the National Museum of
Damascus, and learned the stone tablets dated 6,000 years old, and the writing
said roughly this: “Ten sheep crossed here, or maybe ten goats.”
Now that’s a story.
- Concerning a Traditional Flash
Fiction Structure:
Protagonist: Sara.
Conflict: I’m
not sure. Thing was Sara worked as a janitor in this big high-rise in Chicago
and they gave her $85,000 and her own loft apartment. It was a union job, too. She
had this sack of weed in her closet the size of a beanbag chair. She only drank
Jack Daniels. All of this blew my mind, to be honest. A janitor. I never knew
they lived this lifestyle. I was too small a person to deal with the whole
thing. To just understand I know nothing. Now I know that I know nothing, I
think.
Obstacles and complications: Well,
she routinely ate all my rotel dip. She put it over white rice. Weird. There was the
day she sold my favorite picnic basket on Ebay. Oh, that steamed me like feed corn.
So I hid all her shampoo up in the ceiling tiles. And I put Spree in the
showerhead of her bathroom. I did something else with Superglue and her mom’s shoe
closet, I forget. A series of tiny things that possibly appear a bit larger
now, in the gauzy retrospect of time. Oh, but I remember the Tuesday she told
me, “You know what? The energy of this relationship is all wrong. It’s like
your standard incandescent light bulb.”
“What
the hell does that mean?” I asked her.
And she
strolled right out the door.
Resolution:
I
found the picnic basket later in the attic. My bad.
(“I’m wondering how you would describe me,” Sara said.)
- October 31st,
1999, or the Vagaries of the Muse:
She was in this hotel in Kansas
and had a mound of cocaine. Now look, she’d seen plenty of cocaine in her day but
never in mound form. An early dinner of
Velveeta cheese and bourbon. Watched a TV show where two young models ate raw
horse intestines in an attempt to win $50,000. Finally, the cashier from the
gas shack across the street arrived. He was not what you’d call a looker, but she never was superficial. He
saw that cocaine on the table and it was like a child the first time you let
them run through the sprinkler. Eyes big as the alphabet. “You weren’t lying,” he
said. His clothes must have been on fire, the way he leaped out of them. Outside
the wind was howling (this for the weather people again). Then they started
howling. The walls howled and the ceiling howled and God/cloud-sing/digital
camera Budweiser howled and she woke
up the next afternoon feeling way down scrubbed out true and 6000 years of her
life most likely gone missing. That kind of mileage. There was a knock at the
door they didn’t even hear. And then the kicking.
(If you write 600-700 flash
fictions, possibly one might resemble this Halloween.)
(The tip here is setting.)
(The tip here is to shake
something. To make, or unearth.)
- Concerning several
metaphors I’ll just toss out onto the page.
The
moon is big-ass proud tonight. Like Kelly Clarkson, strutting across the
curtain-parted stage of my windows. I suppose I should sit down and write.
“It was raining hard and the
river rising,” one of my friends told me. “We just kept on digging. Never know
what you’ll find out there.”
(“You don’t love me,” he would
tell her. “The moment I hint you’re not perfect, you could pull out the claw
hammer.”)
I’d like to say here that rotel
dip is not an appetizer. People think that—but it provides a full and satisfying meal.
And I’d like to say, right here
and now, there’s not a damn thing wrong with a standard incandescent light bulb,
or its energy distribution (90% heat, 10% light). We glow how we can, Sara. And
like you, your compact and silvery flickering soul, the new efficient
fluorescent bulbs contain a toxic and deadly core—mercury!
Mercury, Sara!
But I do digress…
- Concerning the Universal
Question:
Because Batman likes dogs.
("For God's sake, come back," I told her.
She said, "No. It's the end.")
About the author
Sean Lovelace has a new collection of flash fiction out from Rose Metal Press. He publishes all over. He blogs here.
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