. Spinning .

The door screeched open and the stranger came in, stood there as the door whined its way shut. He waited for all the heads to turn back to their coffees before he aimed his path down the aisle to the empty booth on the far end of the diner. Each step beneath his boot was sticky where it wasn’t dust and grit brought in from the parking lot. He slid in along the cracked once blue plastic seat, feeling the tug of dried food on his jeans and the back of his shirt. It was his kind of place.

For CW I’ve been reading Flash Fiction Forward, the latest in a collection of super short stories–usually not longer than three pages. While I’ve posted on the class weblog on these, something I’d like to note here is the way these shorties can assist in showcasing some of the elements of writing.

For one thing, it’s usually a lot easier to see the overall story arc–if there is one.  But a larger benefit is to note how little setting and description is needed to establish a viable story.  It’s obvious that these are sometimes necessary for background or basis, but more likely are enhancements that bring the reader more information and thus make him more comfortable within the storyworld environment.

Not all the stories are good, or even stories, yet there are some outstanding examples that provide both worthy study and exercise in brevity.

At the top of the stairs was a snowman, with broccoli eyes and a bright carrot penis, its green feathery tops drooping against the packed snow. As she walked by she reached out and stroked it.. It came off in her hand.

The irises on the sideboard were bending, limped by hats of snow that had first surprised and delighted them.  They had never seen snow, never known a winter.  Here they had been taken care of and protected, given time to grow and bloom and withdraw back into bulbous shells to bloom another day.

Bonnie felt renewed by the sudden cold white surrounding her, as if all of her life, all of her things were sunk and lost beneath the purity of layers.  She took long steps through the room and to the hallway, where the snow was already midway up the second stair.

He didn’t see her.  When he thinks back on it, he still swears to God he didn’t see her. 

"Another one, Fred," he calls. He shifts on the stool, straightens his spine then slips back like mercury into his slumped position that’s taken form over the hours, over the years.  Over many, many scotch and sodas.

"So what’s buggin’ you today, Hal?" the bartender delivers the Dewer’s along with the perfunctory  bartenderly interest in his clients’ lives and problems.  Well worth another possible scotch at three bucks a whack.

"Aw, the women, Fred.  It’s always the women."

"Yeah? What women?"  Fred knew that Hal would be lucky to have a one-legged eighty year-old, half blind and toothless broad interested in him but of course, couldn’t say so.

"Ah, just women.  All women."  Hal looked down into his glass, the crystal cutting the sparkling golden liquid into irresistible sips.  Fred had wandered back down the end of the bar to pull beer into a half dozen frosty mugs from the large black oak keg.  Hal played with his drink, twirling it in the wet rings on the bar with the tips of his fingers.  Then he lifted it up and gulped a good swallow down, closing his eyes as he did.  And that’s when he saw her again, the scared little girl dressed in a red woolen coat who was there and gone in a flash of a thump that barely swerved his truck from the roadway.

Just a note (so I don’t flunk this course again) that I indeed have been writing daily, hourly, in my sleep and in the heap, as I wake and breakfast break, in a vat or with a hat, indeed I have been writing daily.

Just elsewhere: Hypercompendia mainly for writing; Spinning for critique and the elements of writing.

So there.

From the Hanging: