State of Flash – Some notes on (Flash) Fiction

I read fiction for two reasons:

1.Entertainment

People say life is short because it’s actually very long and full of liars. If life were short, people wouldn’t read Tolstoy or Twilight. There would be no time. A crane fly lives for maybe 24-48 hours and 100% of its life is spent eating or fucking. So to avoid being crushed by boredom, I want to be entertained with other people’s [drama/conflicts/fantasies].

Here’s the entirety of a story titled Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans from Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance:

Gainsville!* It’s too bad your cousin is dead!

This feels like paint-by-the-numbers. I get to create the image of the mother. I get to imagine her wearing a purple sweatshirt. I get to imagine all sorts of gruesome deaths for the cousin. I have to try and imagine why the mother speaks in exclamation points. (I can’t, so I give up and laugh, because saying “It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” seems irrational and funny…) Aside from that, I walk away sensing the artist respects my intelligence, and needs my creativity to complete the work.

2.Self-awareness

If Johnny Character chooses X, and I would’ve chosen Y, I now know I am a Y person. Conversely, if Johnny Character does A, I may think “Good job Johnny! I’m an A guy too. I have projected myself into you. Things that happen to you will cause me to have an emotional response.”

Here’s a flash fiction piece titled Our Fathers from Kim Chinquee’s Oh Baby:

When we were in church, my father yelled in the middle of the sermon, ‘”God help me, help me, help me. Our Father Who Art in Heaven, God help me, help me, help me.”

When my eyes move away from the page, I think “I wouldn’t yell in the middle of a sermon! Seems really weird!” Then, memories of my hometown church, my dad yelling, and a smaller me kneeling bedside, screwing up the Lord’s Prayer, appear in my brain. It seems my brain takes the information from the story and focuses on these memories for two reasons:

1. To reduce the psychic trauma associated with “church,” “prayer,” and “father”
2. To resist future trauma associated with “church,” “prayer,” and “father”

It’s like you say to your therapist, “My dad would always yell in church because he had bad gas,” and your therapist says, “And how did that make you feel?” and you say, “You know, it was pretty scary,” and your therapist stares at you silently and you look at the floor and say, “Now I know why I sweat profusely when my husband drinks milk.”

So yes, entertainment and self-awareness. I provide the conflict, setting, imagery, characters, plot, emotions, and by doing so, not only have I exercised my imagination and my intellect, making two dull things a little sharper, but I am more knowledgeable about myself and the world around me, making life a bit easier.

*“Gainsville” is misspelled in the book. Unless there is another “Gainsville”? Google says no. I’m okay with this…