NEW MICRO
Exceptionally Short Fiction
Edited by
JAMES THOMAS
&
ROBERT SCOTELLARO
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923
NEW YORK | LONDON
CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Robert Shapard
INTRODUCTION
PAMELA PAINTER
Letting Go
Help
STUART DYBEK
Initiation
KIM ADDONIZIO
Starlight
What Jimmy Remembers
BRIAN HINSHAW
The Custodian
SARAH FRELIGH
Another Thing
We Smoke
LORRAINE LÓPEZ
The Night Aliens in a White Van Kidnapped My Teenage Son Near the Baptist Church Parking Lot
JOY WILLIAMS
Clean
NANCY STOHLMAN
Death Row Hugger
I Found Your Voodoo Doll on the Dance Floor After Last Call
STEVEN SHERRILL
Alter Call
AMY HEMPEL
The Man in Bogotá
TANIA HERSHMAN
My Mother Was an Upright Piano
JENNIFER PIERONI
Local Woman Gets a Jolt
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
Sleepover
My Bliss
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Slow
NICHOLAS DICHARIO
Sweaters
MEG POKRASS
The Landlord
Cutlery
SHERRIE FLICK
On the Rocks
Porch Light
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
Witness
BERNARD COOPER
The Hurricane Ride
BARRY BASDEN
Johnny Came By
Aerospace
AMELIA GRAY
AM:103
66:PM
MEG TUITE
Dad’s Strung Out Women Blues
TOM HAZUKA
Utilitarianism
DIANE WILLIAMS
A Mere Flask Poured Out
Removal Men
RON KOERTGE
War
Principles of Handicapping
ROBERTA ALLEN
The Beheading
The Fly
DARLIN’ NEAL
Polka Dot
Four Hundred Miles
KEVIN GRIFFITH
Furnace
MOLLY GILES
No Soy for Joy
Protest
STEVE ALMOND
Dumbrowski’s Advice
LOU BEACH
Humanity Services
Shot by a Monkey
STEFANIE FREELE
You Are the Raisin, I Am the Loaf
Crumple
JIM HEYNEN
Why Would a Woman Pour Boiling Water on Her Head?
ERIN DIONNE
New Rollerskates
CLAUDIA SMITH
Mermaid
Colts
FRANCINE WITTE
The Millers’ Barbeque
Jetty Explains the Universe
THAISA FRANK
The New Thieves
The Cat Lover
PETER ORNER
At Horseneck Beach
GRANT FAULKNER
Model Upside Down on the Stairs
Way Station
LYNN MUNDELL
The Old Days
NIN ANDREWS
The Orgasm Needs a Photo of Herself
The Orgasm Thinks You Have Forgotten Her
WILLIAM WALSH
So Much Love in the Room
ARLENE ANG
Unannounced Guest
RON WALLACE
Siding
No Answer
KIM CHINQUEE
No One Was with Him
He Was on the Second Floor
ANTHONY TOGNAZZINI
I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such as These
AMY L. CLARK
Looking for Nick Westlund on the MBTA
What I Really Meant Was That I Loved You
DAVID SHUMATE
The Polka-Dot Shirt
Accordion Lessons
GAY DEGANI
Abbreviated Glossary
JAMES CLAFFEY
Kingmaker
PIA Z. EHRHARDT
Brides
PEDRO PONCE
The Illustrated Woman
One of Everything
ELIZABETH ELLEN
Panama City by Daylight
8 × 10
DINTY W. MOORE
Rumford
MICHELLE ELVY
Triptych
Antarctica
DAMIAN DRESSICK
Four Hard Facts About Water
KATHY FISH
The Possibility of Bears
Akimbo
ROBERT VAUGHAN
What’s Left Unsaid
Time for Dessert
MELISSA FRATERRIGO
Momma’s Boy
MICHAEL MARTONE
Miners
Dan Quayle Thinking: On Snipe Hunting
PAUL BECKMAN
Brother Speak
TIFF HOLLAND
Hot Work
JEFF LANDON
Flying
JOSH RUSSELL
Our Boys
Black Cat
CHRISTOPHER MERKNER
Children at the Bar
TARA LASKOWSKI
We’re Gonna Be Here Awhile
Dendrochronology
MICHAEL CZYZNIEJEWSKI
Intrigued by Reincarnation, Skip Dillard Embraces Buddhism
Eating William Wells’ Stout Heart, Fort Dearborn, 1812
LEN KUNTZ
Lens
The Hard Dance
DEBRA MARQUART
Dylan’s Lost Years
This New Quiet
ROY KESEY
Calisthenics
Learning to Count in a Small Town
KATHLEEN McGOOKEY
Another Drowning, Miner Lake
KYLE HEMMINGS
Supergirl
Father Dunne’s School for Wayward Boys #1
MELISSA McCRACKEN
Implosion
It Would’ve Been Hot
RANDALL BROWN
Cadge
THERESA WYATT
Gettysburg, July, 1863
STACE BUDZKO
How to Set a House on Fire
ZACHARY SCHOMBURG
Death Letter
DAWN RAFFEL
Near Taurus
Cheaters
MATT SAILOR
Taste
Sea Air
SOPHIE ROSENBLUM
Once We Left Tampa
You Sure Look Nice in This Light
JAMES TATE
Long-Term Memory
ANA MARÍA SHUA
Hermit
LOUIS JENKINS
The Skiff
Indecision
CURTIS SMITH
The Storm
The Quarry
MARY MILLER
A Detached Observer
Los Angeles
DON SHEA
Blindsided
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN
Women When They Put Their Clothes On in the Morning
TARA LYNN MASIH
This Heat
Ella
RON CARLSON
Grief
AFTERWORD by Christopher Merrill
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BOOKS BY THE AUTHORS
CREDITS
NEW MICRO
FOREWORD
For those who already love microfiction—exceptionally short stories—this book offers you the best of the
best. For those just now discovering micros, this book introduces you to a true phenomenon in recent American fiction.
The phenomenon is that stories have been growing shorter and shorter, for decades breaking down the conventions of longer fiction. Many of the most talented authors in America now write micros, even as they continue writing other forms such as the novel. Why? Because micros capture what longer forms can’t.
So what exactly does a micro do, or capture? To paraphrase one writer, a good micro hangs in the air of the mind like an image made of smoke. Another says micros can bring you to a point of recognition in a paragraph, then, foregoing any novelistic wind-down, leave you there suspended in that wonderful moment. It’s been said that micros can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred; and, perhaps more humbly, that micros are as intense as poetry, because readers who like to skip can’t skip in a one-page story. Some dwell on the literary form of the micro; others simply say it’s a new way of seeing things.
This phenomenon didn’t happen overnight. For decades, writers experimented with shorter forms that flourished in the medium of the printed page. Then one day, the unimaginable happened—the Internet arrived. These were made for each other, and became possibly the first tech elopement in literary history. Their marriage spread microfiction to new audiences everywhere.
One last word. Although micros are fun to read—an intrigue, a joke, a mystery tightrope-walking across the page—be forewarned. They also go deep. These stories matter, almost before you know it.
—Robert Shapard
INTRODUCTION
All of the stories in this book are shorter than 300 words. All of them explore their own terra incognita—uncharted territories—through stories told in new and innovative ways. Sometimes they blur literary conventions, in what Stuart Dybek calls “a continuum of infinite gradations that spans the poles of fiction and poetry, the narrative, and the lyric.”
Intrigued by this, readers have been happy to dive right in. That readership is almost as diverse as the stories, as we discovered in our years-long search for micro narratives in online and print journals, individual collections, and smaller anthologies devoted to these exceptionally short story genres, by whatever name.
We chose the name Micro to recognize Jerome Stern’s iconic Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories, published a generation ago. His book followed a trajectory that readers liked, that of stories getting shorter by half every few years, beginning with Sudden Fiction with its 1,500-word limit and Flash Fiction at 750. Stern’s book, drawing from a yearly contest, chose a 300-word limit. All of these lengths remain popular, but microfiction especially is emerging as the leading edge of exploration.
What have we found? These stories are small but not slight. They invite the reader to interpret the unfilled spaces. They are rife with implication, demonstrating that what is lost in explanation is more than gained through imagination. These works expand exponentially with nuance and detail, and resonate in the silences like the last notes of a cello.
In other words, these pieces are brief, but don’t take shortcuts. Their borders are permeable. They are mysterious. The paths to them unworn. And here are eighty-nine eminently talented authors—some well known and others new to the craft—each with news from their own uncharted territories. For you to discover and explore.
PAMELA PAINTER
Letting Go
I’m standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon photographing florid undulating rock walls that drop to alarming depths. But it is almost checkout time at my hotel, and I want to take a tub and use all their emollients, a habit my ex deplored. When a young couple approaches to ask if I would please take their photograph, I want to say, I’m not the Park photographer. This happens to me everywhere—in the Boston Gardens, along the banks of the Charles. Always a couple in love—like this couple in their multi-pocket hiking shorts and sturdy Clarks. I let my Nikon dangle from the beaded lanyard round my neck, and take their fancy smart phone, heeding their instructions. “You were always a good listener,” my ex once said, “but sometimes you have to let things go.” I line the couple up in front of the Canyon’s distant north rim, bronze wall aglow. I wave them to the right a bit. Joined at the hip, they happily sidle right, probably thinking I am a good photographer. Then I motion for them to step toward me for another photo. Unaccountably, they shuffle three steps back—and disappear with scrabbling sounds and tiny shrieks. Then no sound at all. I whirl around for help but there is no one in sight. On hands and knees, I peer over the cliff’s edge, but it hides the floor far below. As if to assure myself that they were once here, I look at their photographs. Against two backdrops, they are young, expectant, with squinty smiles in the morning sun. And then a blur. Breathe, I tell myself. I set the phone on a wooden bench for someone to find. It is the only evidence the three of us were here.
PAMELA PAINTER
Help
The music decibel is at an all-time high, and the barback just quit. Benny’s pulling beers, pissier than usual. He hates college kids but he hates yuppies more. He gives Denise the job of sloshing glasses clean on upside-down mops that pass for a dishwasher. The job sucks, but Denise is taking the semester off to save money for art supplies. Benny doesn’t know this. As she lowers a glass onto a soapy mop and turns it around, Benny elbows her arm. “I’m timing them,” he says, his gaze locked on Gents. “The girl went in first and he followed.” He pulls another Bud into a cleanish glass. “The girl in the pink skirt?” Denise asks. She feels like she’s screaming over the din. “Three minutes, maybe five, they’re doing dope,” he yells. “Any longer, it’s sex. No respect for them who has to take a piss.” Minutes pass. Denise pictures the girl’s pink skirt hiked up, panties tight around her ankles. The guy’s belt buckle twanging on the floor. “Watch this,” Benny says, and muscles out from behind the bar, a door wedge in his hand. Denise doesn’t have to watch to know where he puts it. He’s back and only he and Denise can separate the thumping of the jukebox from fists pounding on the door. “You hear that,” Benny says, grinning. She nods, sadly. She hears it. Once she was locked in a ladies room, something gone wrong with the door. She remembers calling “Somebody?” It sounds stupid to her now, calling “somebody?” But finally somebody came.
STUART DYBEK
Initiation
The doors snap open on Addison, and the kid in dirty hightops and a sleeveless denim jacket that shows off a blue pitchfork tattooed on his bicep jogs forward beneath a backward baseball cap and grabs the purse off a babushka’s lap. She’s been sitting with an arm through the purse strap, and lets out a plea to a God with a foreign name, and hangs on. The kid gives it another yank, one that ought to break the strap. It jerks the old lady out of her seat.
“Hey!” I yell from a window seat, and a guy in a suit seated beside me fingering his cell flinches like I’ve elbowed him in the ribs.
Old lady in tow, the kid is already one leg out the door. The doors in the car, like the doors the length of the train, repeatedly stutter closed and open while on the intercom the robot conductor’s voice of gargled static repeats instructions for disembarking.
I stand and yell “Hey”—I’ll have that feeble “Hey” to remember—and someone else shouts, “Help, police!” and someone else, “Stop!” and the kid punches the old woman in the face, sending her glasses flying. She lets go then, flung backward as the doors bang shut and the train slides off along the station.
All of us in the car, except for the old woman pressing her babushka to her mouth and spitting out bloody pieces of what we’ll later realize are dentures, can see the kid racing down the platform toward the exit with a wild grin on his face as he dodges commuters, and his pack of buddies, who’ve been riding other cars join in running, high-fiving as they go, pounding congratulations on each other’s backs, each one swinging a purse.
KIM ADDONIZIO
Starlight
Ten p.m. walking past the Greyhound station on Seventh Street. Bums curled
in every doorway. Rita’s high heels loud, the silence following her like a man with a knife. Do what I tell you. Until she’s running, past the Jack In The Box, lit up, inside solitary men hunched over coffee, torn sugar packets on plastic trays, black girls in striped uniforms. The Embassy Theater posters, DAMES, TASTE OF PINK, a girl with green hair in the glassed-in booth reading a magazine, Madonna on the cover. Into the Starlight Room where Jimmy’s supposed to be. At the round bar two men are playing dice with the bartender. Rita orders gin and 7 Up. The room is round, too, no corners, mural of the city curving along one wall. Cords of strung white lights blinking above her. Three drinks later she swears she’s turning, points a finger at the Golden Gate until it shifts out of range. Turquoise glow above the painted hills. Out of money now. Slam of the dice cup. The carousel spinning her. Her father holding her red coat and doll, plastic pinwheel she won at the penny toss. Blurring as she goes by. She lays her cheek on the bar, the reins loose in her hands.
KIM ADDONIZIO
What Jimmy Remembers
Girls in white stockings and checkered wool jumpers, round white collars, red bows at their throats. Birds in Saint Christopher’s schoolyard—hundreds of them, black, spread out across the lawn in late afternoon. The brick wall of the steel mill on Dye Street he could see from the living room window, his father in there working, his mother in a shiny black dress coming in at dawn after singing in some nightclub, waking him for school. Shivering and dressing over the heating vent in the front hall. Dark-blue blazer and black shoes. A puppy that died of distemper, put in a shopping bag and into a can in Bushler’s Alley. Cotton candy on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, the barkers calling Hey bub, Hey sonny, Buster, Skip, You. Mickey the Waffle-Whiffer, old retarded guy they used to tease by dropping pennies into his coffee at the Meatball Cafe. Stickball in the streets. Touching Mary Prinski’s left breast, just the underside of it, not even getting to the nipple but that was enough. The black hearse carrying his father through the snow, a semicircle of metal folding chairs. The green faces in avocado leaves smiling down at him. God in the clouds. Who art in Heaven. His mother, ghost now: wearing a stolen mink, flipping a cigarette from a deck of Lucky’s. His father moving toward her with a match, cupping his palms around the flame.