My son Malachi recently turned me on to 365tomorrows, a cool site that offers a surgically precise little bit of flash fiction every day. "What is flash fiction?" you ask. Kathy Kachelries, brain-mama of 365tomorrows, answers:
“The most concise and widely-cited example of flash fiction is the story Ernest Hemingway penned, allegedly to settle a bar bet: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Despite the limitations of its length, this story, framed as an advertisement, satisfies all of the requirements of a short story: protagonist, conflict, and resolution..."
Of course, some of the daily flash pieces ain't exactly Hemingway, but the idea of flash fiction as a writing exercise intrigues me, and some of the pieces are perfectly...perfect. Like eating a single capsule of Good'n'Plenty. My favorite so far is "Oates" by Ian Rennie...
I don’t want to do this any more.
It’s cold, and we’re all hungry. I knew it would be like this, but that’s the difference between knowing and experiencing.
Nobody talks much any more, Scott least of all. When we were on the way there, he tried to keep people’s spirits up by talking up the grand adventure. When we got to the pole and found we had lost, that all this was for the privilege of being the second team to get there, he sort of withdrew. He doesn’t show how much this has broken him, doesn’t show that he suspects what I know for certain. We are all going to die here.
Read the rest here. (It'll take you all of five minutes.)
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