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There doesn't seem to be an existing section for this, so I thought it'd be interesting to make a thread in which we can share and discuss any pieces of Flash and Micro Fiction - stories that are notable for both their brevity and depth. Either your own work or work by published authors (please credit). For the purposes of this thread, I'm going to go ahead and set the maximum word-counts for posted pieces at nothing longer than 1000 words but with NO minimum word-count. Let's see what you come up with
What Is Flash Fiction? : 365 tomorrows
To start off with, I'm going to post in three pieces. The first one is by myself (I wrote it quite some time ago so it's not great, but whatever). The last two are by Hemingway.
Beautiful Again
It’s about two-thirty in the afternoon of May the Fifth, and at a time like this in a place like Venice Waters, you can almost swear time stands still, the air saturated with its own lethargy so hot even the flies just kind of give up and lie flat out on window-sills somewhere and gasp - They say that the temperature in a place like this can peak at 108 in the glare, and that doesn’t change much less even in shade such is the humidity.
It’s quiet here too because, despite it's name, Venice Waters has never had too much in the way of resemblance to the Geographical namesakes that make up it's poetical etymology - well, there was once water here of course, but all long gone now, herded to extinction by the powers of the dust, when it swept across the surrounding fields and turned all living things dead years ago and burying all victims - a sole exception being the shell of the desalinization plant left clinging to the decrepit shoreline and looking infinitely absurd - So all that remains of a lake here now is the parched bed extending out into the hazy tomorrow gone but for graphic portrayals (with unnatural blue coloured water bleached, whitened plus ridiculous drawings of palm trees) plastered all over the "Welcome To Our Town" signs standing at the boundaries of the town like a tombstones - oh and it probably goes without saying that the town doesn't look much like Venice in Italy either being as it consists of little more than a couple-a-dozen crusted old homes and rusty bits from abandoned machines: but all those things are okay now, because nobody who lives in Venice Waters knows what Venice in Italy looks like since the only library closed down all those years ago.
Miss Marta Berry owns the town's only business, a ratted convenience store at the busier end of the main street where big sellers are coffee, doughnuts and the medium-sized tankers of multi-grade engine oil - these things all being the staple diet of passing haulier truckers and out of town farmers since most local people won’t shop at Marta Berry’s anymore ever since Marta Berry got kind of strange: really fat and with the most awful acne of the kind that looks like bullet wounds - She also has teeth broken to small jaundiced points like some kind of small, fat rat and not forgetting that she also keeps this pet parrot, a mostly-blind creature named Sherlock that she’d allow to fly around the shop clumsy like mad and shitting all over the floors not to mention (if rumours are to be believed) big bombing shittings into the vast vats of coffee and churning bubblegum flavoured ice-slush that sit lidlessly and listlessly over by the newspaper racks - and all this oddity in a town that would’ve once burned women for witchcraft for half as much. So townspeople avoid Marta's store now, always in preference of the big supermarkets sat safe distances out of the town and on the main road - for they have now consigned it, and with it her, to that long list of terrible inconveniences that just ought be avoided.
Old Duane Huff is probably the only townsperson now who ever shops at Marta's, at least regularly, but even he ‘don't visit often’ since he only ever eats canned pork ‘n’ beans and Marta only ever sells canned pork ‘n’ beans in huge family sized tins, ones that can feed Old Duane Huff for close to a week since he never has been much of an eater. But he comes anyway (even though the Supermarket sells cheaper and in much more sensible sizes) just because he always likes to visit Marta's - she makes him remember things
They had gone to school, the local school, together and damn had she been so pretty then with perfect skin, shining eyes and most important of all: a really great set of beautiful bouncing tits - yeah a perfect pair and big but not so big, and Old Duane Huff always kept sinful ideas that he could most definitely find endless happiness in involvement with such tits as those - And because of this he can always remember them especially well like a sort of watermark charting Marta’s life since he’d known her from her gone days of being young and pretty to the present days (even when it has been a while, like it always is because of those damnable big tins) - They were the first pair of tits he had ever masturbated over after all, and so although this made him cringe a little now that they were both old and abandoned, and he could see this sweating monstrosity of her steaming hulk and smell the sourness of her breath mixed with the perpetual stink of Sherlock’s projectile shitting with raw abandon, he still knows it is her because despite everything her voice hasn't changed (but for growing a little raspier and wearier perhaps), it remains still her voice. And it is enough.
So it is now that when she’d turns away perhaps to locate her cigarettes or to glance outside the window, sometimes he closes his eyes for just a few seconds to listen to the eternal cascades of conversation, and when he does that he will often lose himself for just a moment in memories that cut him to the core with shards of the broken china voice - and, as the crickets sing through the silence of outside, with the wind blowing a cadaverous old tumbleweed across that sad lake bed, it is in those moments that he is in love. For it is in those moments that she becomes beautiful again.
A Very Short Story by Ernest Hemingway
One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarreled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had only been a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.
And, perhaps my favorite so far as flash fiction goes. Again by Hemingway, the shortest complete short story in the world:
For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn
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