Flash write, flash read, flash dance
Best flash fiction of 2017 has arrived
Now in its third year, “The Best Small Fictions” anthology collects the year’s best short stories under 1,000 words. Variously called flash fiction, micro-fiction or haibun, they might be seen as exercises in setting a scene and introducing characters and plot points as quickly as possible. No time can be wasted on superfluous descriptions or dialogue; every word has to earn its place.
Some of these 55 winning stories have been previously published in literary magazines or story collections, such as two entries from Joy Williams’ “99 Stories of God” and one contribution from flash fiction maestro Stuart Dybek. The table of contents is thus a combination of familiar and up-and-coming authors, many of whom have novels in progress.
Starting with a zinger of a first line is one strategy for making a short-short story stand out, and there are certainly some excellent opening sentences here. Allegra Hyde’s “Syndication” begins her account of siblings raised by doomsday types with “My parents are in the backyard, digging their graves,” while Alex Simand’s timely take on current events, “Election Cycle,” opens with “You never asked for the circus, but it comes anyway.”
Symbols and similes are crucial to conveying shorthand meaning, like the dog tattoos shared by three generations of tough women in Nick Almeida’s “Watchdog.” More often than not it is indeed animals providing the metaphorical palette: a station wagon is “a muttering alligator” in Len Kuntz’s “Summer Scalping: Scarecrows,” for instance; “their inner lives … were as visible as the organs of a gecko in the glow of a porch light” in Mr. Dybek’s “Ascent.”
A number of stories pivot on the contrast between urban and natural worlds, as another metaphor exemplifies: “elevated highways lying on their sides like resting greyhounds” (Gen Del Raye’s “The Truth About Distance”). Series editor Tara L. Masih noted the surprising statistic that roughly 60 percent of the nominated stories mentioned birds — most notably, Karen Brennan’s “10 Birds.” Perhaps this speaks to an ever-present wish to fly away from troubles.
Some individual stand-outs are Phillip Sterling’s charming “Registry,” about his and hers mismatched dishes accumulated over the course of their lives; “States of Matter,” Tara Laskowski’s deliciously creepy story of revenge aided by a gravedigger; and Matthew Baker’s “The President’s Doubles,” in which an island nation becomes so protective of its imperiled leader that he essentially ends up a prisoner.
Other characters include an atheist who develops a stigmata, a grandmother who dives for sea urchins, a psychic who doles out free aphorisms, a man who keeps his wife’s ashes on the nightstand, and an ex-con tender enough to save a life. A couple of second-person stories and another in the first-person plural break up the more conventional narrative approaches.
One of the most unique stories is Anne Valente’s “A Personal History of Arson,” structured as an inventory of possessions, with notes on the melting points of the different substances. Rapid-fire sentences and the imperative mood suggest a traumatized impatience. “Preserve all artifacts,” the narrator orders, underlining how memory is bound up in material objects.
They’ve saved the best for last in this collection, though: Brian Doyle’s “My Devils,” in which an Irish-American boy learns how to interpret the adult world by deciphering what people say versus what they mean, and picking up on unspoken communication such as gestures. It’s remarkable how concisely a coming of age and loss of blind faith are conveyed.
Although there are fewer overall highlights than in the first volume, this is still an excellent snapshot of contemporary super-short story writing, recommended for story lovers and newbies alike.