Flash! Four Works of Micro-Fiction (with audio recordings)

Inhabiting the rich borderland between poetry and prose, these stories combine compression and narrative in a form that, author Dana Wall says, “effectively captures the compressed intensity of war.”

Editor’s Note: While most of the stories we receive and publish are between one thousand and five thousand words, today’s online feature presents four flash stories ranging from 844 to just 266 words. Inhabiting the rich borderland between poetry and prose, these stories combine compression and narrative in a form that, author Dana Wall says, “effectively captures the compressed intensity of war” and its aftermath.

The sharp focus and brevity of “The House,” for example, mimics “the probing, disinterested flash of a news camera upon every intimate detail of the house before discarding it, as the daily news cycle moves on to the next horror,” author Adi Dvir explains. In “The Translator’s Daughter,” Wall says she chose the flash form because it “mirrors the fragmented nature of immigrant identity and historical trauma.”

The experience of war and geopolitical violence is also, at its core, one of removal and of physical and cultural annihilation, which is embodied literally in the empty walls in “The Last Museum Guard in Kyiv.” And “Sea of Wheat,” which author Andrea Jurjević says initially began as “images of a displaced brother and sister holding memories of war in their bodies,” needed to stay small “to operate on the level of suggestion rather than comprehensiveness.” The power of these stories comes as much from what is not said as what is said. In the deliberate omission of a larger narrative, “absence speaks the unspeakable.”*

—Elizabeth Lukács Chesla, Fiction Editor

*Lori Ann Stephens, quoted in The Art of Brevity by Grant Faulkner, University of New Mexico Press, 2023.