You're in for a treat this morning readers, a post about short stories that was NOT written by me. Nope, it's a guest post from the wonderful David Abrams, he of The Quivering Pen blog (and the forthcoming novel, Fobbit, no time frame just yet). Here we go:
Cold June by Francine Witte (Ropewalk Press, 2010)
The best short-short stories are trash compactors. Short-shorts (aka flash fiction, micro-fiction, and postcard fiction) are repositories of all the scraps of life—the fruit peels, the hair clumps, the soup cans, the utility bills, the paper towels which soaked up that puddle of cat vomit you found with your bare feet on the kitchen floor at 2 a.m. Short-shorts squeeze and compress the whole beautiful trashy experience of life down to an unbelievably-small, impermeably-hard cube of matter which, if you could reconstitute it, would expand to the size of the average Dickens novel.
In her award-winning chapbook from Ropewalk Press, Cold June, Francine Witte delivers stories the size of a breadbox, but you always walk away feeling like you’ve eaten an entire bakery. The book is 26 pages long and there are 23 stories. That should give you some idea of length. What it doesn’t indicate is the depth and breadth of the stories. Witte is smart, sharp and very funny (I’d go so far as to say she’s a witty writer if it wasn’t such a lame play on her name).
As any short-story writer will tell you, there’s no time to be wasted—especially in short-shorts. Get in, get out, leave the reader reeling. Emotions are telegraphed, backstories are only hinted at, and language, the yeast of the writer’s bakery, must always rise to the occasion. In Witte’s case, it’s not just a question of what to leave out (though I imagine she revised these stories to within an inch of their lives) but what to put in. The details of her page-long scenarios are thrilling and memorable. Here, for instance, are three sentences from the collection’s title story:
The weatherman talks about a cooling sun, and predictions of ocean waves freezing mid-curl. Cuts to Florida where the local station shows icy palm trees with shivery fronds. Then, a citrus farmer, puffy cloud breath, screwdrivers open an orange, the fruit inside like broken glass.
Witte sets the stage with the standard signal words of cold weather: “freezing,” “icy,” “cloud breath.” But then she gives an unexpected twist to the language: the mid-curl waves, the shivering palm fronds, and that wonderful use of “screwdrivers” as a verb which leads to the equally juxtaposed image of the broken glass of the fruit. When I read sentences like those, something inside my own brain shatters and tinkles.
And that’s just the first story of the 23. Witte has plenty more surprises up her short sleeves. We learn that “Gluttony” is not just the title of a story, it’s also the main character’s favorite sin: “Sarah eats because frankly the food kisses her back.” On the next page, the story “Arm” begins: “Eunice felt worthless, and so she put her arm up for auction on e-Bay.” The story “Pretending” opens like this:
One day, Jenna pretends she is dead.
Pretending to be dead isn’t easy, as Jenna is quick to find out. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t even talk on the phone.
She breaks her phone rule to call Rolly. To tell him the news.
“Oh yeah?” he says. “You’ve been dead to me for awhile.”
You can see how Witte builds tension quickly, adhering to that get-in, get-out rule. There are only a few hundred words left in “Pretending,” but I’m already shifting in my seat at this point.
Like many short-short writers, Witte begins telling some of her stories in the titles with efficient economy, as in “When Mary Gets Shot in the Head,” which opens: “Her thoughts spill out on the street like fortune cookie tapes. I love you, Hector, I’m late for work, and shit, that guy has a gun!
In the space of 100 words, Witte can create entire worlds and put flesh on complex characters. What she shows the reader is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, hinting at the enormous mass floating beneath the waves. She is an incredibly intelligent writer who makes all the right choices; she knows just what to reveal and just what to keep submerged. For instance, our brief introduction to a man named Hank in “Arm” is all we need to know about his character: “Hank was balloony and humid and was always popping the buttons off his shirts.”
Most of the stories in Cold June center around relationships, particularly the struggles of male-female couples. In “The Miller’s Barbecue,” a love quadrangle comes to a head when a lovesick teenager jumps fully clothed into a swimming pool. In one story, Annabel and her boyfriend compete to see who can be first to air-dry after a shower; in another, Jim tells Mary to “get her naggy self off the planet,” so Mary rockets into the stratosphere to become a constellation (“Jim would need a telescope and a clear, moonless night, if he was ever going to see her again”).
Yes, metaphor is working overtime; and yes, oddity is at a premium on these pages. But Witte is never weird for weird’s sake. She always has something important to say and it’s wrapped in packages smaller than a breadbox. Cold June tackles big themes like global warming, class prejudice, adultery and domestic violence. There’s even a story called “Jetty Explains the Universe” which boils down to this: “it’s big and endless.” Not unlike Witte’s stories themselves.
David Abrams blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen (www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com). His stories have been published in Esquire, Narrative, Connecticut Review, and The Greensboro Review, among others. He is working on a comic novel about the Iraq War called Fobbit.
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