Today is Friday and that means that at some point in the next 21 hours, I’m going to write 55 words which contain an entire story. I’m not that big on memes but this one (“55 Fiction Fridays”) is precious to me, because it reminds me of writing exercises and workshops and english minor-y goodness. Por ejemplo:
She nervously adjusted her sari, hoping no one noticed. So far, the night had gone flawlessly; she had made a good impression on everyone, she could just tell.
The older woman at the table noted how silk was tugged upwards. Taking a delicate sip of tea, she thought, “She’s not good enough for our family.”
I’ve consistently written one of these uber-short shorts for weeks now, but last week was the first time a fellow mutineer noticed. Abhi’s interest in the concept of nanofiction made me ponder the possibility that some of YOU would find it fascinating as well. If I further needed to justify making a mutiny out of it, know this: the good Professor Guest Blogger himself reads my “55” and I am aware of this because he referenced one at the last NYC meetup. Not that I need to defend it or anything… 😉
Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length.[wiki]
That Hemingway example is ridiculously inspiring. One day I want to write a short that short. I don’t even know if there is a name for a short so short. There is, however, a name for the type of writing this meme encourages:
One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count. An example is 55 Fiction or Nanofiction. These are complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.[wiki]
The virus is spreading throughout the brown blogosphere. SM readers Maisnon, Andrea and Chai are the three whom I go out of my way to check on (hee! no pressure, kids!), but if you decide to try it, please leave a link to your work of art in the comments. I’ll be happy if you flash me. 🙂
Hello Anna,
Would you like us to write some desi-focused “short shorts” here, or is your message just an “FYI” ?
“Fifty five words to write a story”
“That’s it? Fifty five words?”
“And the prize is?”
“No prize. Just for fun and sepia-mutiny”
She stirs and takes off her panties again.
“No prize? Forget it. Come back to bed”
I slink to her, she kisses my neck.
“You spend too much time on the internet”
I can’t get over that Hemingway piece. It’s so good.
I’m going to have a go at this 55 word malarky, I don’t care if the only other people are girls! I already have a background in super short movie-making. I just uploaded one to Google Video (who seem to have put some funny noise at the end).
Due to a lack of a blog of one’s own:
Her feet pounded on the pavement. Her mind raced. Past the boathouse. Grad school, work, boy, marriage. Under the bridge. Dance, gym, career, parents, family. Down the stairs. One, two, three. Up the stairs. She slowed, stretching, reaching, her lungs expanding. One, two, three. Contracting. One, two, three. Time to start living the questions again.
BongBreaker – you made that film? It’s great! Please email me, I want to ask you about the music. There’s a .jpg email address on my web site.
My quickie attempt:
Vikas soon learned how to size up the customers. The people in the corner booth were whispering about their check, louder than they thought: “Could you take it? I promise I’ll pay you back. Niles has my card. He’s coming back on Friday.”
Her voice broke. “I think.” Was it, or wasn’t it, a date?
One from me:
Their eyes locked and for a moment the bride’s mask fell. Her face was a harbinger of the unspoken accusations in the decades ahead, the ice already closing over the remnants of her idealism and memories of another.
“She’ll adjust”, thought her mother, the lies coming more easily to her now. “After all, I did”.
for desi short shorts – read S.M. Manto.Yes, him of the Toba Tek Singh fame – short shorts are not a 21 th century concept :-). His shorts will blow you away.
For good shorts read ammani
Aurangzeb wondered if he would live to see sunset, and peered at the Persian calligraphy one more time.
That saint again, inexplicably neither Hindu nor Muslim. The letter finally triggering acknowledgement of over fifty years of ruthless piety and suicidal arrogance; the horror of the path ahead still to be seen. My life was wasted….
A City Hall wedding had made sense. The license was just a formality; after all, they’d been together five years, lived together four. They were husband and wife long before the Judge declared them so.
Peering into the remains of the brownie fudge chunk, he wondered, “how will I get rid of her now?”
After Didi died, I thought Mummy would crumble. Strangely, it was Papa who stayed in his pajamas all day– for weeks– and would sit on the porch chain-smoking.
From where I was hiding, in the hall closet, I could see him crying into his hands as the Salvation Army collected the last of DidiÂ’s clothes.
As he lifted the spoon to feed him, he paused. He wondered how many more days they would have like this: father and son eating together. The head turned away sharply as he lifted spoon to mouth, meaning that he was now full.
“ThatÂ’s okay dad,” said the son, “we’ll try some more at dinner”
“Never leave home without lipstick!” Good advice, mom. I’m a grown woman and that’s all I ever learned from you. Don’t forget foundation and blush. Can’t let anyone see. Put on a bright smile and meet the other wives. Wish there was makeup for the bruises on the inside too.
She rubbed the gooseflesh on thin arms that now resembled elongated rambutans. Her thin cotton dress fluttered in gusts of airconditioning. She sat down on a luggage cart, and tried not to gape at the white people. Asphalt glittered to the horizon outside.
So this was America. It didn’t look like Sesame Street at all.
damn those are good
OK, sorry for being the only commenter not to contribute his/her 55-word story, but I couldn’t resist after I was reminded of the opening lines of James Merrill’s epic (set around a ouija board no less) The Changing Light at Sandover, and I type ’em below as encouragement to all the 55-ers:
Admittedly I err by undertaking this In the present time. The baldest prose reportage was called for That would reach The widest public in the shortest time. Time, it had transpired, was of the essence, Time, the very attar of the rose, was running out. We though were ancient foes, I and the deadline…
[The above is from memory, so don’t get on my case if I got some of it not quite right]…
Umair,
no worries! i didn’t expect people to leave actual 55s in the comments unless they lacked blogs of their own, though i’m totally fine with it. this is delightful! (and NO, they don’t HAVE to be desi-related.)
everyone else,
if you just want to comment, you can, you know. you don’t HAVE to write one. 😀
Upon the hilly dunes he stood as the Janjaweed below descended like a plague upon the dark skinned refugees, burning and tearing. Soon he would descend upon them.
Unsheathing his twin blades Justice and Vengeance, he resolved to utter the words “Victims, aren’t we all,” each time he found his mark. He found it often.
Surreptiously she clicked the window open. “Last time,” she promised herself, “then back to work.” Frantically looking around her, palms sweaty, eyes gleaming, she scrolled down. An hour later, she felt a slightly damp palm on her shoulder. Shrieking, guiltily she spun and confronted her boss. “I didn’t know you were a fellow Mutineer too.”
The colour of their skin is the same cocoa brown, but their features set them apart; his slanted eyes and nappy hair, her prominent nose and wide hips. Inside of their bodies, the same organs and viens bubble, the same hearts beat, but it is not enough to please them. Legacies of keeping up appearances.
“Since I gave you that leather eye patch, you look about as glum as a Canadian goose stuck in an oil slick”. Cortez didn’t answer, but his live eye glistened with revolutionary conceit. He continued, in the same cloying tone, “Why don’t you go skull fuck yourself, Porky?”
I’d written a few a week or so ago, here
Here are some others, by a few other bloggers…. 1, 2, 3.
Here is mine for this week:
She moved a strand of hair out of his face. His eyes suddenly had a light in them that wasn’t there before. She traced the outline of his lips, then brushed them lightly. “I guess this is as good as it gets,” she thought to herself.
Sighing, she closed Photoshop and gathered her things together.
(more on trilia.net)
Hemingway style flash fiction:
Ad reads: Wife wanted. Males only.
In morgue, body moving. Send help!
Across table. Husband drunk. Heart sinks.
Headstone, looming. As seen. From Below.
Wrinked face. Thinning hair. Mirror upstairs (Dorian Gray version).
Anna asks. We write. Friday afternoon 🙂
That should be portrait upstairs, right?
this is fantastic! 😀 surely, agents will be descending on our NDHQ, begging us for your contact info, so that they can rep you and your ridiculous talent.
i love it. all this creativity in one thread. it’s YUMMY.
:+:
dj isabella,
i’m so proud of you. 🙂
heart,
your best girl in berkeley
I have read your 55 Fiction Fridays sometimes. The sari one, I had read it a while ago. It is crisp……..
She ran home hurriedly, damp between her legs. Her parents would be waiting for her. She grabbed the signs she had placed by the door and jumped into the familyÂ’s Truth Truck headed for the neighbourhood clinic.
She wondered: will the physician inside see me? And will he wonder why I came back so soon?
Her teacher pulled her aside and explained that because she didnÂ’t believe that the small biscuit between the priestÂ’s thumb and forefinger was the Body of the Savior, she couldnÂ’t have a nibble. In actuality, she hadnÂ’t eaten breakfast that morning and it was hours before lunch. She wished she could have one to satiate her hunger.
HA hah ha ha ha!
ohhh God I can’t stop. Make it stop. Here’s another:
The grasslands in Mara stretched uninterrupted, not a single bush behind which I could empty my stretched-to-full bladder. The bumps in the road didnÂ’t help much either. Finally I had to go. Behind the car, passengerÂ’s eyes diverted politely.
A lioness watched patiently across the brush, thinking to herself, “Ahh Tourists! The other white meat.”
In the summer afternoon quiet, he helped the Ashramites collect the white cotton towels drying on the line. Bathing with his clothes on today, out on the mossy stones next to the well, with the rest, he had missed being perfectly naked in her tub with the door closed to the world outside, with her.
It was like magic. As their eyes locked momentarily across the crowd, he felt an eternal bliss, an unqualified peace wash over him. His hands tingled two or three times, as he heard two gentle words clear above the din.
The words echoed in his head for what seemed like an eternity – “Hey Ram”.
Damn. Chilling.
The backdoor to the secret bunker was propped open so that his accomplice could gain easy access during the night. Together they would mutiny against the Mutiny.
Locked in cages and powerless he would taunt them mercilessly, even as he took control and used what they had built together to carry out his hidden agenda.
Note to ‘A runner’. You’re singing my life with your words. Good one!
Transported back to 1951, the thought of making money by betting on cricket matches yet to happen was for some strange reason furthest from my mind, which should give you a sense of just how at home I felt with the whole affair. But then: “I wish she’d married either Kabir or Amit. . .”
“Actually,” he said – but then he always began sentences that way – “it’s really not like that at all,” and proceeded to explain, but his words, slippery and articulated with an ease that suggested he liked talking, came to mean something quite different. Her eyes glanced at the screen, and she knew he had seen her.
yay! I love Fast Fiction Fridays at the Mutiny. Can we do it again next week?
Ok, I’m joining in .. my very first attempt –
At the end of this last round, their two souls would join as one. Her hometown Gurdwara was filled with love – a mother’s tear, a sister’s smile, a father’s pride.
She took small steps, with the palla clutched tightly in her beautifully decorated hands, and finally allowed the tears to flow from her tired eyes.
Interesting design, he thought admiring the ill-lit spiral stairwells. You go up on one, and come down on the other. How else could you control the continuous traffic? Conserving space, while being a relatively easy climb. Brilliant!
But it creaked. creak, crick, creak, ..
“Crick! Geez! Wake up, motherf***er!” “Yawwwwwwwwn! Watson, how about a double-helix?”
I run into her three years later, “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year..”. Damn it, does our life have to be like a Pink Flyod song.
Kush, that was only 33 words. I am banning you right now.
Arranged Marriage
She sat demurely on the bed, awaiting her new husband. In preparation her skin had been plucked and waxed, caked and powdered. And bleached. As he lifted her sari, he gasped at the ghostly face before him.
And to think his mom brought him here because she didnÂ’t want him to marry a white girl.
Oh fine, you’ve finally coerced me into it. But I’m not making any promises. 🙂
It couldnÂ’t have been a worse day. Today makes me wish IÂ’d fall down a manhole or something, so I could quit trying to salvage it. From the minute I was ejected out of bed, IÂ’ve been fantasizing about coming home and hiding in the couch.
Fuzzy green.
Shit, I canÂ’t even have grilled cheese?
Something desi :
He was looking out the window as he mumbled about tough times and change.
Was it ten days or fifteen before I become illegal ? I couldn’t remember.
Priya knew she’d have company again tonight, as she finished her tequila and strained to hear her next one-night-stand over the noise of the club.
Her soulmate’s voice flashed in her mind but she blocked it; Dad’s refusing to say Yes, anyway…
“Live for today”, she thought, and for a moment she almost believed it.
55 words for Fiction Friday, dead on. Ban waiver requested. Here:
I run into her three years later, “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year…” Damn it, does our life have to be like a Pink Floyd song?
“.,running over the same old ground. What have we found?” Punish me? You look beautiful, now stab me, please. How I wish?
He looked admiringly at Saurabh, sleeping peacefully a few feet from him. His son always had been his biggest pride.
He still recalled when Saurabh won his first school medal. “Dad, do you want more?”
“Kalia Saab…”, he felt brigadier squeeze his arm.
“Rest now, my son”, he thought, as he lit the pyre.