FlashFiction.Net

Yesterday, I had the sincere pleasure of blogging at Flash Fiction Chronicles and attempting to answer the question, "What is flash fiction?" Today, as a kind-of follow-up to that article, I'd like to answer a different question: "How do I make my fiction flash?" This question is one that I'm often asked by students, who seem less concerned with how it flashes and more interested in how it achieves its flashosity. What they're really asking, methinks, is for more "nuts & bolts" advice and less artsy-fartsy, head-in-the-clouds theories.

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So here are six 100% guaranteed ways to make fiction flash.

1. Look for an an unexpected entrance into the story. I often find these openings after having written the story more traditionally, with an opening exposition, a setting-of-the-scene, a gradual movement toward what's going on. It's often in the third or fourth paragraph. Here's how a flash I'd written awhile ago starts:
   
   

   After Diana was flown into the Towers, I'd moved to this enclave of a handful of houses and buried myself in the forgotten bomb shelter.
   
   Then one night in the pond outside, I'd found Lily McClane floating. I lifted her to land, beat her chest, puffed air into her mouth. Her mother then descended upon me, kicked me off and I rolled into the dank depths of the pond and heard, trapped in the water, Lily's choked screams.
   
   When she was alive, only Lily ever visited me. She brought me pottery families, baked in her oven.Now, even dead, Lily came, seemingly empty-handed. Her freckles twinkled like fireflies.
   
   Tonight she appeared in the bunker as a ten-year-old girl of substance. She appeared dry and dark. Her emerald eyes and her red hair shone with vigorous life. She exhaled foggy puffs. And she said, simply and plainly, "Hello, Mister Brown."
   
   Sunken into the beanbag chair, I'd been staring into the dark and listening to Decemberists songs. I removed the headphones. "What word do you bring, Lily, from the Underworld"

   
   The story might work if it just opened with Lily's entrance: Lily--the Girl Who Drowned in the Pond--appeared in the bunker as a ten-year-old girl of substance. She appeared dry and dark, her emerald eyes and red hair shining with vigorous life. She exhaled foggy puffs.


2. Maxi or Mini, with nothing in between. Go for the endless exhale of word after word of the maximalist or the near-nothingness of word and white space of the minimalist. Don't get stuck in the nowhere land of in-between.


3. Nail that ending. Make sure it's the excellentest line in the story. End the story when you get that line. Odds are you wrote past it. Find it and nail it down. Woo-hoo!


4. Make a single word count more than any other. I'm sure I've said a hundred hundred times that every word literally does count in flash fiction, with its word-limit restrictions of no more than 250, 500, 750, 1000 words.  So, instead of going the route of making every word count, something that is said far too often about flash, trying writing a flash where a single word counts way, way more than any other, where the entire weight of the flash falls upon it. Imagine if that word were the title. How thrilling would that be.
   


5. Set yourself against a rule. Find a rule about writing and/or writing flash that you know is insanely wrong. Set yourself against that rule. I published a story that set itself against the rule not to use "suddenly" in a story, and then I heard Billy Collins read a poem where he did the same thing. Here's his version: "Tension." Your desire to break a rule gives the flash a kind of subtext, a meta-purpose, that something else that helps it overspill its tiny container.
   


6. Mess with language. Try doing something with the language, grammar, syntax, diction, word choice never before seen. Use parentheses in a new, powerful way. Add a prefix to a word that never before had that prefix attached to it. Have some kind of trope--cataloging, similes, zeugma--appear throughout.

Flash will always be about a word count (usually under 1000 words), but that doesn't quite answer the question, because not everything written under 1000 word would be considered flash fiction. Of course, its tininess defines it, but again, I think it's the mindset of the writer, when faced with the challenge of tininess, that makes fiction flash. Below are nine (9) tiny things that answer "What is flash fiction?" from the perspective, not of the piece itself, but of its author. (continue reading)

Matt Bell’s How the Broken Lead the Blind seems deceptively simple at first, consisting of 55 pages, with only ten stories, of length ranging from a sparse page and a quarter to nearly seven pages in length. The ten stories, though, are carefully arranged, their trajectories minutely adjusted and sent to spin and crash together with a precision that would seem cold if it didn’t have beneath it a true concern for the human condition. (continue reading)

As a follow-up to Shaula Evans's asking "What is flash fiction?" Deborah Walker provides an answer:

I write the short-story kind of flash, but after reading some of the contest stories I'd like to attempt the vignette type.

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But what I try with all my stories, no matter what length, is to get the what I think of as the 'emotional thread' to the story. Trying to incorporate an 'aha' moment for the reader (doesn't have to be character-change; it can be the reveal style). It's exciting to try and do this with the vignette and much more challenging I think.

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Perhaps that's why I have a more genre style than literary (not wanting to open that can of worms—I know genre writing can have literary elements—of course and I love spec fiction like that).

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Vestal Review is a good place to check out—I think they're the ones who pay more per word for the shorter works.

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If you're writing short-story flash, do you feel cramped by the word count? What do you find stays in and what do you cut?

I do like flash. Writing flash is a treat for me.

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I usually set out specifically to write it. Especially when I've finished a long story (that's around 5K for me). I can complete the story in one or two sittings (let's say 4-8 hours).

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I don't feel cramped because I know I'm going to write to that length. For me that means limiting the characters to one or two.

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But then again, I also write drabbles (exactly 100 words) and tweets (140 characters around 20 words). It's a mind-set for me.

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To answer your question, I don't need to cut much, because I know that Im writing to that length. Occasionally a story goes over, and that's fine, but not as often as you'd think. It's a kinda magic: I know I want to write flash and that's what happens. I don't know how I do it; as with other aspects of my writing it's instinctive.

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The writer Shaula Evans recently began a discussion on flash fiction in her Zoetrope Virtual Writer's Studio room it takes a village to raise a writer. Here's how she began that discussion:

I've been reading up on flash fiction over the holidays.

There seems to be zero consensus about what flash is. Cool! That's exciting! That means we're still in the inchoate stage of a new form with room to experiment and play.

I could discern two main camps in the battle to define flash. One camp says flash is all about word count: it's a story, just like a short story, only shorter. And these extra-short stories have word counts of around 1000 words or less, depending on who you ask.

The other camp says flash is all about /not/ being a short story. It's about capturing a moment, but not just a vignette or a snapshot, a moment of transformation, of insight, of epiphany. It's about seizing THE moment when something happens, when something shifts.

(I've grossly oversimplified. There's lots of nuance out there in other people's ideas, and there's more of a continuum of thinking than a dichotomy. These just seem to be the two poles of the thinking that I've encountered.)

I've betrayed my bias here: I think the second idea is more interesting. But at least half the important people in writing disagree with me.

I'm coming to realize that it's pretty much impossible to reconcile these two approaches to flash, the it-is-a-story concept versus the it's-not-a-story concept.

I'm also coming to realize that writing the stories I have in me to write, and letting the story dictate the form, is the truest way for me to write.

I'm raising the question here because I'm very interested in what YOU think Flash is. Do you read it? Do you write it? What works for you? What misses the mark? Do you care about flash at all or is the form not for you?

I'm not interested in definitive answers—they're a good way to shut down a conversation, and a bad way to stir up creativity. But I'm very interested in your opinions, and your experiences and impressions as writers and readers.

What are the hallmarks of good flash for you as a reader? And what do you try to do with flash as a writer?

What's flash all about anyway? What do you think?

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In the next week or so, I'll add some of the responses Shaula received to her questions, and of course I'd love to hear your own thoughts about "what's flash all about anyway?" \

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Rob Parnell's article "Writing An Act of Magic" begins, "You have thoughts. You write them down as words. Later, others read them and your thoughts become theirs. Spooky, eh? I’m sure it was once, when the Druids roamed prehistoric Europe, exchanging information in the form of archaic symbols." (continue reading)

That is the flash fiction question for today. If you go against expectation, how do you make it clear to readers that they are to read it differently, that you are aware of the expectation they bring to your piece and you are aware of how that expectation might lead them away from the "point" of your piece? (continue reading)

There's a lot to love here in Meg's comment, but I'm especially drawn to this comment: "Words like sneaker, wave, behind, and slide. These words are flexible—spontaneous, sly, and delicious if you allow them to be!" The flash fiction writer uses words for the seduction, more so perhaps than plotting, and they might be akin to Seinfeld's special bedroom move, the clockwise swirl. (continue reading)

Now imagine "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing" as flash. Well, you don't have to imagine it. I transformed it into flash below (continue reading)

Brandi Wells has writing forthcoming from McSweeney's, Improbable Object, Apt, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Bust down the door and eat all the chickens. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/ . (continue reading)

I've just finished reading Stefanie Freele's Feeding Strays for the second time, and I've got hundreds of things to talk about, but what's on my mind now is this: her beginnings astound me. (continue reading)

While reading The Underneath by Kathi Appelt I was struck not only by the incredible writing —one reason you should read her book—but as I read chapter after chapter, I began to realize each one was in of itself a piece of flash fiction. I had the great pleasure of interviewing her, and I asked her about The Underneath, her use of the short chapter structure, as well as a few other questions. (continue reading)

Writing in Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa discusses impostor syndrome: "Many highly accomplished women suffer from the feeling that they are impostors and they do not belong where they are and they don’t deserve what they have accomplished through their own talent and hard work." I shall add this to my list of "disorders" I share with women, including (but not limited to) mitral valve prolapse, a grouchy bowel, and, for a brief time in fifth grade, the anticipatory anxiety of getting one's period.

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The site "Ovecoming the Impostor Syndrome" asks these questions:

• Do you secretly worry that others will find out you’re not as intelligent and competent as they seem to think you are?


• Do you often dismiss your accomplishments as a “fluke” or “no big deal?”


• Do you sometimes shy away from challenge because of nagging self-doubt?


• Are you crushed by even constructive criticism, taking it as evidence of your ineptness?

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They should end with this question: Are you a writer? I know that this sense that "I don't belong" drives me to prove that I do, and each "success" fills me with the anxiety that I will be discovered for the fraud that I am. However, at the same time I am driven by the doubt to write more, succeed more, in an effort to silence that nagging internal critic. My guess is that, if I were to cure myself of this impostor syndrome, that I would be at a loss as to what to write for. I am both driven crazy and to write by this fear of being found out, like the Wizard behind the emerald curtain.

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Flash is the right place for such anxiety, methinks. If indeed every word is both proof of my fraudulence and evidence against it, then imagine the tension and charged urgency that takes place in the compressed space of flash fiction. As in Gulliver's Lilliput, things are both small (the Lilliputians) and enlarged (Gulliver's faults), and this desire to send something small into the world and make it matter seems perfectly suited for the impostor syndrome sufferer.

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I tell people, if I'm able to tell them that I'm a writer (rarely), that I write very tiny things. They want to know "How tiny?"--and that I think is an accomplishment, to get them wondering how small a writing might be to allow someone to still call himself a writer. I tell them only 100 words or so, and they look at me the way Dorothy looked toward Toto as he exposed the wonderful wizard of oz. I've come to love that look, all that it uncovers. I have impostor syndrome, I can say now, to explain it all. "Oh," they might say. "That does explain things, doesn't it?"

In reading a novel, I find myself picking out the essential words or images that lead to meaning, like the images of daisies, eggs, eyes, in-carnations in Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. Or maybe it's the men Dorothy finds in Oz I direct my attention to. She is surrounded by them, even Toto, all but the Witch and Glinda. In reading Kim Chinquee's work, nothing can be ignored, and even the tiniest pattern, the tiniest deviation matters in large ways. (continue reading)

I found this essay written during my MFA. I think it was written at a time when I began to think of each sentence as its own story. That thought process came while reading Ian McEwan's Saturday. Maybe it's interesting. Maybe not. (continue reading)

I came across an interesting article on the short-short during a search for the text of Lex Williford's "Pendergast's Daughter." In The Common Room, the Knox College Journal of Literary Criticism, there's William Boast's "The Heimlich and Unheimlich in Short-Short Fiction." Some excerpts and thoughts.

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"Because our imaginations tend to run wild when we read, a large amount of information can be implied by a small amount of text" (4).

I've recently become more and more convinced  there's more to the requirements of flash fiction than the limits of word count. One essential challenge is for each word to imply all that has been omitted. Sometimes, it has to do with not explaining what an image/description already makes clear (he raised his fist in anger), and other times it's that poetic sense of objects as seen in Imagism (the rules of which  Pound stated and Wikipedia quoted: "direct treatment of the 'thing', whether subjective or objective; and to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.") As I look around at the objects of my office—the Gold Peak ice tea bottle, the Orbit gum, the iPhone, the iPod playing Chris Isaak, the Frida Kahlo magnet & quote "I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality," the Scooby-Doo stickers—I wonder what each one might imply, and how that choice of what object/detail/word to include in a story includes not only that word but all that the word brings with it (and all the meanings/implications/experiences the reader might have attached to that word).

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"Like all other fiction, short-shorts must also have a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Short-short fiction, however, is unique in the extent to which it exaggerates their coexistence" (5).

I'm thinking of Pamela Painter's "New Year" in Micro Fiction, in which the familiar break-up scene becomes something else when a cased Italian ham goes on a cross-country trip. Flashes unfold for me the way dreams do, each image weighted with what it is, what it isn't, what it represents—and each surreal twist treated as if it rationally belonged.

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"In Freud's essay 'The Uncanny,' the German words heimlich [of the house, not strange] and unheimlich [withheld from others, not known] are related to our English definition of uncanny....The unheimlich alters the reading pattern. It dislocates the reader, forces him out of the realm of the familiar, and replaces the ability to predict with uncertainty" (5-6).

I've noticed recently the tendency of micro fiction pieces to use generic nouns/relationships (the man, the daughter, the woman, the niece, the bus driver) rather than specific names. It makes sense, of course,  for small fictions to use archetypal names to break out of the confines of the compressed space and reach for the universal. But also there's something strange about this world without names, something uncanny—and so much of the short short feels that way, and it's no wonder, because we (as readers) are often thrown into the middle of things and then thrown out of things without any time to acclimate.

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"Tension or suspense enters a fiction when we are no longer able to accurately guess its direction" (8).

Jennifer Pieroni discusses the "smart surprise" in her essay on flash in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide, and I've used that phrase a million times already since reading it. It's about this idea of tension created by uncertainty, and faced with uncertainty, one often comes up with a ritual to relieve the anxiety of not-knowing—and so maybe the ritual of the reader when confronted with a world in which every word is a surprise and cannot be predicted  is to continue reading, until the anxiety subsides (& the story ends).We read on to relieve the anxiety that each read-word produces within us, in the hopes that our reading will end it.

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"This 'incomplete completeness' [of the short short] requires that the writer frustrate the reader in his or her attempt to tidy conclusions about the situations, ideas, or possible endings a fiction presents" (9).

The classic structure of a character's desire driving a narrative into existence by forcing the character to act and fail, act and fail, act and fail before that desire can be resolved doesn't quite work in the short space of flash to reach a "tidy conclusion." A reader could be left wondering how such a profound change could happen in such a short space. So flash writers might explore other ways for their pieces to end, and one way is for the opposite to occur, especially given the constant reminder of constraint that exists within the form. In other words, the ending might open, rather than close, the story.

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"Short-shorts continue to work on the reader's imagination by using suggestion rather than statement as their final effect. They often contain last lines or last paragraphs which surprise or reveal new information that complicates the resolution of the fiction or forces the reader to reevaluate what he has previously read" (10).

This process of "reevaluation" is an interesting one. I'm not sure a reader wants to reevaluate the reading of a novel, a reading which might have taken days or weeks or months. It's hard enough to remember, let alone reevaluate. But a reader might be more willing to reconsider and reread and reevaluate a reading that took a few minutes. The reader might even read it again, in that new light.

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"There's something in...last lines which defies explanation" (11).

Poems are like this for me, maybe too often, something about them defying the efforts I make to quantify the meaning gleaned from them. Maybe flash is a qualitive form, whatever that might mean.

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After a break of a few days, we're back (yay us!) and ready to talk some flash. I'm currently teaching a flash fiction worskhop as part of Rosemont College's MFA program, and we've been enjoying the essays in theThe Rose Metal Press Field Guide To Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field , the exercises in Anne Bernays's & Pamela Painter's What If?, and the shorts in Jerome Stern's Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories. I've also been relentlessly reading craft books lately.

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So today is random note day. Some thoughts and notes I've jotted down from this immersion into the world of flash craft, the in-progress drafts, the finished work, the discussions about how to make our pieces brilliant.

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"It's helpful to say to yourself that dialogue in a story is not like dialogue in real life. Real life dialogue wanders, loops, stops, digresses and picks up subjects from a hundred other conversations. You can't do that in a story. Dialogue in a story is highly organized, it's a form of action, and, as such, it must contain drama and conflict and motivation." — Douglas Glover

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"If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don't have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if don't know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will." — Flannery O'Connor

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"[Begin with] situations that are already under way—situations that are starting to unravel because of, or in spite of, the desires and actions of the beleaguered characters." — What If?

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"The great one-page fiction is intensely compressed, every line weighted precisely, every image firing on multiple levels. Good one-page fictions have a spiral construction: the words circle out from a dense, packed core, and the spiral moves through the words, past the boundary of the page…like a ghost self. The words of the last line should create a silence, a white space in which the reader breathes. The story enters that breath, and continues." — Jayne Anne Phillips,"How I Taught Myself to Write," from the Rose Metal Press Field Guide

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"Literature is a way of thinking in which you think by pushing your characters through a set of actions (testing that character in a series of scenes which involve the same conflict)."— Douglas Glover

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"POV is the 'central intelligence'...[and] operates as eyes, ears, memory, and understanding through which the narrative makes its progress— What If?

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Jung: "Pathology comes from a story untold."

Philip Stevick: "Life does not contain plots."

— both quoted in the introduction to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide

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"The title is as close [the prose writer] will get to writing poetry. The poem loves to play close, in the valence of individual words and their multiple meanings, sometimes contradictory, meanings the words embody as well as the lubricated surfaces of several such words rubbing up against one another." — "Titled: The Title: A Short Short Story's Own Short Short Story," The Rose Metal Press Field Guide

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"My half sister is shrieking in the front seat of the car while her husband—a gambler like our father—races through the mountains at top speed." — the opening line of Roberta Allen's "Daydream" in Micro Fiction.

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"He sits in the front row, large, a large man with large hands and large ears, dry lips, fresh-cut hair, pink skin, clear eyes that don't blink, a nice man, calm, that's the impression he gives.... — the opening of Molly Giles's "The Poet's Husband" in Micro Fiction

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"...writers who have found ways to play upon a very small field..." — from Jerome Stern's introduction to Micro Fiction

Now and then, I return to novels such as The Great Gatsby and try to figure out their wonder. It of course ruins it all, most times, the figuring it out, but now and then the process energizes me to use some of their brilliant strategies in my own work. In Gatsby, I love how Fitzgerald has created a Daisy—that symbol of the state of the world—and there's some lovely passages that get at the center of things.

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“Perhaps you know that lady.” Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree. Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.

“She’s lovely,” said Daisy.

“The man bending over her is her director.”

...

It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing with Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his Star. They were still under the white plum tree and their faces were touching except for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek.

“I like her,” said Daisy, “I think she’s lovely.”

But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place.” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

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I so love how Fitzgerald emphasizes her innocence through the portrayal of the movie star. The "human orchid of a woman"—another flower—Fitzgerald repeatedly associates with whiteness; she is a ghost, a star, attached to moonlight and the "white plum tree." This lady emerges as a figure of purity, something more idea than flesh, something innocent shining against the black backdrop. The orchid—rare, delicate, expensive—symbolizes sophistication and elegance, a precious fragility, something more spirit than material. More phantom than flesh, she is linked to "unreality," to the movies, to the world of dreams and illusions. Twice, Daisy characterizes her as "lovely," a sign that this "gesture" of love is what Daisy loves, what attracts her.

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But daisies aren't only white, they contain yellow, just as an egg does, the yellow the sign of corruption that prevents eggs and daisies from being entirely pure. Daisy loves gestures, euphemisms, unobtrusiveness—all things that cover what is real, that "raw" emotion, the idea made flesh. What a gesture does is express some underlying emotion, a cover for it, something that replaces the emotion itself. The preference for a gesture over an emotion, then, becomes a corruption, for the pure emotion is what is real; the gesture is a diminished form. If gestures of love, rather than the love itself is what Daisy wants, then she will be clearly attracted to Gatsby's unfathomable gesture of love, his becoming Gatsby for her—"bending toward her…to attain this proximity"—at the same time she will recoil when he desires this idea of love to be made real, be born into flesh.

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And therein lies the corruption not only in Daisy, but in the world itself. The stars that once shone in the heavens have now fallen to earth, illusory figures flickering across America, followed by hordes of fans. For Gatsby, Daisy is such a figure, an idea of heaven, of transcendence, of a purity unrecoverable in the world—and all would be fine as long as no moment arises when love needs to be made material, when the emotion behind all the gestures needs to be fully realized. Then, that which was once lovely transforms into "something awful," something appalling—and the world he has created in the West Egg will crack, an egg, looking remarkably, with its yellow center and white edges, like a Daisy.

If you are like me (and for your sake I hope that's not the case), then you tire of the discussions about the lines that divide the prose poem and the flash, and you could, in the end, care less about why someone breaks lines or doesn't, why singular paragraphs tend to be called prose poems, and the more paragraphs one creates, the more likely one is writing flash. All you know is that breaking your lines creates something not very good. (continue reading)

Yes, I continue the obsession with tragedy in this Tuesday's Flash Focus, beginning with Louis Ruprecht's neat summary of the two primary conflicts that emerge from Hegelian tragedy: (1) "the self comes into conflict with the social and political powers that be"; and (2) the individual comes into conflict with "Destiny, the gods, and the will of the world" (42). (continue reading)

Kathy Fish's "Wren"—a featured story in FRiGG —utilizes the encounter between healthy and unhealthy to reveal truths about both such states of existence. (continue reading)

This fresh-out-of-the-shop feature of FlashFiction.Net asks a writer of a piece to interview one of its readers. Here, Joseph Young interviews Michael Kimball about his (short) short "Eleven." (continue reading)

In short, the short short engages in its own tragic battle against the restrictions of form—of the requirements that demand closure, of the reader’s need for certainty and meaning. In the modernist world of Freud, one probed beneath the surface certain to find some submerged, deeper meaning; in the postmodern world, such a journey leads one to the realization that the world no longer has the power to provide such certainty and answers—and all we can do is figure out the right questions to ask. (continue reading)

In Victoria Redel's Already the World (Kent State University Press, 1995), there are many wonders, this but one of them, "Talking Angel." (continue reading)

I remember wanting to writing like Jeff Landon, realizing I never would quite get there, and that being okay, then realizing later it was a silly thing to want to write like, or be as good as, someone else, but that first desire to be like Jeff drove my first flash narratives into existence, to fly as Jeff did in that first Quick Fiction tale I came to again and again. (continue reading)

Sarah Black of Bannock Street Press recently sent me this "graffiti" flash by Tim Jones-Yelvington. She writes, "I really love Tim's story, such a tiny perfect story. I'd been photographing the graf in Freak Alley for illustrations for one of the books, and asked Tim if I could put his up as sort of an add for the press. But once I had it up, I felt like I didn't want to use it for commercial purposes, but wanted to just put it out there in the world."

"Several groups watched me paint it—a group of teenagers, a couple of the Greek cooks, and a blonde waitress. The cooks and waitress came out so often and stood around I thought they were going for their dope, hidden in the alley—but then I realized they were reading it!"

Painted Faces
Tim Jones-Yelvington (originally appeared in Keyhole)