The Miracle of Micro

This morning I received a long first draft of a magazine article to edit. The writer apologized in his email, “sorry, you hired a novelist, it takes me 300 pages to make a point.” Certainly, the epic novel is one of man’s best friends. But what is it about the short story merely that hints at itself, that leaves you with cud to chew, a notion to consider? Words are heuristics for the larger thing and sometimes, less is more.

Micro fiction (not to be confused with flash fiction) is a story in less than 250 words. In 1996, Jerome Stern gave us Micro Fiction: An anthology of Really Short Stories. Since then, microfiction has settled into a pseudo-form of its own. Most microfiction anthologies are the result of fierce microfiction competitions. Yet these contests are more about the challenge of rules rather than the legitimacy of form. Often times microfiction is simply poetry rebranded. The shorter the microfiction, the greater the liklihood it is free form poetry. At what point does small become too small to be fiction?

Successful microfiction is a narrative whittled down to an essence, requiring rereads and reverie. Why all the mess with novels and such if I can feel it all in 200 words? Here is a favorite.

Honeycomb

Mrs. Stick stood breathless in her kitchen stirring rutabagas and pigs’ knuckles into a heavy stew. She was expecting Mr. Mann, who had a produce stand in the next district where every day a gang of quarreling farmers came to weigh their squash and sugar beets on the dusty scale in his pickup. Mr. Mann was lean and oily, with black bristles of hair that could paint her belly honey yellow in flat wide strokes. She wanted him to want her but she knew he liked his women meatier, with thick toenails that could click against his like castanets. Mrs. Stick hummed the score from Oklahoma and waited, feeling desire part her like a comb.

When the stew was ready, she skimmed off the scum and tossed it onto her mulch pile beneath the only living elm tree in the county, two paces from her baby’s grave. She thought of those eyelids less yielding than a doll’s, that unbearable silence, felt the old hollow ache as wind rushed up her ash-colored skirt. When she opened her eyes again there he was, as real as grain, riding across the valley, the dust fluttering behind like a cloud of worker bees. His truck kalumphed; there were mounds of squash pounding up and down just for her.

“How much does a baby weigh?” he’d ask her when she exclaimed how big they were, how perfectly whole. After their meal they’d walk to the river while the last of the sun spit honey, their clasped fingers shortening the stretch of empty fields.

– Natalia Rachel Singer