Later, you’ll claim there were warnings. Unusual bird calls. That double rainbow you snapped for Instagram. A knowing gleam in the eyes of the hibachi waitress. To make sense of a thing is to make it your own, and…
CRAFT is delighted to share a triptych of humorous microfictions by Grant Faulkner, previously included in Best Microfiction 2022. The following pieces take on the subject matter of craft and critical essays from the perspectives of three fictional individuals,…
I was a lucky little kid, and I’m a luckier little whatever this is now. —Mom, Diary (January 2021) Not sharing is what they call it when one puppy eats another’s dinner, drawing blood from anything that tries to…
This is a story about oranges. The fruit the rich kids ate when the rest of us ate mandarins. Those kids were nicknamed Orenji-jok and rode fancy cars in Apgujeong. We waited for the winter to buy boxes of…
My dead Aunty May visits me while I assemble the baby’s crib. Her pale blue fingers catch my wrist while I’m twisting the Allen wrench to secure the right side panel. Delia, my wife, is at work. Aunty May…
My Favorite Elvis The boy and the dog were both named Elvis. Whenever Daddy hollered “Elvis” they both came to him. Even when it was one of them he wanted: the boy for a chore, the dog for a…
Essay by Michelle Ross • Since the first time I read a Sara Lippmann story, I’ve been smitten. Among the inventory of qualities I admire is her wit, her raw honesty, her faith in her readers’ ability to keep…
I followed Horace’s horns as he walked ahead of me into the tearoom. No matter how many times he visited me, I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes off the silky brown pelt of his neck, or the gentle…
Essay by J. A Tyler • Milk Fed made me want to ingest a mountain of delicious, sugary, fatty foods—donuts, chips, pizza, candy—then sprint into the arms of some lusty entanglement. Yet the novel also gave me bouts of…
The woman sitting in front of me loudly whispers in her crying baby’s ear, “Sobby Robby, stop it. Shut up, Sobby Robby.” There’s a glob of hard dirt stuck below her right ear. Or maybe it’s a birthmark. Her…
A high percentage of my flash fiction is in the fragmented form. There’s something very Proustian about this form for me. We humans tend to have random memories pop into our heads when we’re doing the most mundane things (like standing in line and someone’s actions spark the memory of Louise and her sassy denim shorts who stole your dad away when you were a kid). Those little memories spark emotions, which in turn tend to spark more memories and more emotions.
My flashes always begin with an image tied to an emotion (in this case, a young woman with commitment issues who is anxious thinking her boyfriend is going to propose). I never edit myself in a first draft—I just follow the rabbit hole and write whatever associations, regardless of how tenuous, pop into my head. “Fitting” these together into a coherent story comes later, when I begin to pick that first draft apart—rearranging, deleting—as the emotion I’m trying to convey starts to take shape within my choices. Once I’m happy I’m heading in the right direction, this is when I read the piece out loud, and I listen for the words and sentences and images that announce their need to be erased, to let their absence shout their importance to the reader instead. I keep chiseling away until I can’t find one more instance where I’d make a change, then I put it away for a few days or weeks until I feel like I can look at it with fresh eyes. Invariably, I end up rewriting entire sections and/or cutting even more.
Life rarely makes sense from separate moments across a lifespan, but these moments have a Jungian synchronicity. This is why fragmented flash is my favorite form as I put those moments together like pieces of a puzzle. And it’s our job as writers (or storytellers—I like storytellers much better) to make the puzzle pieces fit and to create the picture on the front of the puzzle box. I love it when even I’m surprised at what the front of that puzzle box ends up looking like—sort of like life’s moments, how they still can surprise me, how I never thought this moment would connect to that moment from years ago. But they do. You just have to look for the truth in each moment.
L MARI HARRIS’s most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in matchbook, Ponder Review, (mac)ro(mic), Bandit Lit, Pithead Chapel, Tiny Molecules, among others. She works in the tech industry and lives in the Ozarks. Follow her on Twitter @LMariHarris and read more of her work at lmariharris.wordpress.com.
