by James Thomas
“You try too hard,” he says, sitting on the steps in the shallow end, his penis bobbing in the water like a cork. He takes a hard pull as if this distance is my fault. I don’t say anything because I can’t think of any way to win this conversation and there is certainly no way for me to win him, so I swim butterfly from one end of the pool to the other, displacing as much water as I can, while he watches me.
MARY MILLER
Los Angeles
The whole time I was manipulating him I was telling him how it was done.
I took the phone into the bathroom so he could hear me pee.
“I’m peeing,” I said.
“Oh!” he said, “you are?”
“I had to go. By the way this is called feigned intimacy, and men love it.” I told him the other ways it could be accomplished: drinking out of a man’s glass, touching his knee. The whole point is early, you have to get there early.
He was far away. We’d met over the internet. It was all pretend so you could say anything. I proceeded to get drunk and tell him my problems, all the while telling him it was bad manners to get shitfaced and spill your guts right away. “Of course,” I said, “my manners were never very good.” I could swear I was lying but everything I said was true. He said he was Superman, took it back. What he meant was he was good in bed. I needed something to think about at night, my husband curled into the television set and a stack of books I’d never read. He’d seen pictures: contact lenses, mascara, looking away from the camera.
“I’m pretty,” I said, giving him my bra size.
“I know you’re pretty!” he said. “You’re hot! And D-cups don’t hurt either!” He called out for Jesus then. I felt bugs crawling on my face but there was nothing there.
I was looking for a way out. Once I found it I would find my way back in. I didn’t know where he was coming from. He lived in Los Angeles, palm trees out his window.
DON SHEA
Blindsided
It started as a low, sweet jumble of sound, whiny and country, from the far end of the subway car. Then you could make out a small, pale man of middle years and thinning hair shuffling forward through the passengers with a dog by his side and a sack on his back containing a radio or tape player from which this strangely sweet country sound—a voice, a guitar and fiddle—was spilling out and he was singing along with it, singing along with his own voice or whoever’s, singing softly in a nasal tenor as clear as spring water, and then you recognized the song, one of John Denver’s impossibly sentimental ballads about home and hearth and supper on the stove that you were always ashamed of liking, but you would not be taken that easily—street-smart New Yorker—and you searched his bowed head for fraud, searched out his eyes even as you reached for your loose change, and just then the small pale man drew abreast of you and threw back his head, and as his eyes came up milky and twisted and wrong, his face fused ecstatically and the purest sound came forth from him and struck something inside you that came undone, and you would have given great value at that moment to see what he saw, to see what lay beyond embarrassment.
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN
Women When They Put Their Clothes On in the Morning
It’s really a very beautiful exchange of values when women put their clothes on in the morning and she is brand-new and you’ve never seen her put her clothes on before.
You’ve been lovers and you’ve slept together and there’s nothing more you can do about that, so it’s time for her to put her clothes on.
Maybe you’ve already had breakfast and she’s slipped her sweater on to cook a nice bare-assed breakfast for you, padding in sweet flesh around the kitchen, and you both discussed in length the poetry of Rilke which she knew a great deal about, surprising you.
But now it’s time for her to put her clothes on because you’ve both had so much coffee that you can’t drink any more and it’s time for her to go home and it’s time for her to go to work and you want to stay there alone because you’ve got some things to do around the house and you’re going outside together for a nice walk and it’s time for you to go home and it’s time for you to go to work and she’s got some things that she wants to do around the house.
Or . . . maybe it’s even love.
But anyway: It’s time for her to put her clothes on and it’s so beautiful when she does it. Her body slowly disappears and comes out quite nicely all in clothes. There’s a virginal quality to it. She’s got her clothes on, and the beginning is over.
TARA LYNN MASIH
This Heat
Bats are flying around on the third floor again. Trapped. We live on a hill, so the height attracts them. Like a belfry. My husband is gone again. The beans he planted in the garden during the full moon are wilting. I’m not tending to the new shoots in this July heat. Like the jungle, he says, this heat. The news is bad lately. More troops killed this month than in any other. I keep the paper away from him, but he watches the reports on TV. This new war brings the old one back. In his sleep, he fights with the chain that hangs from the overhead bedroom light. He is always waging some past battle. Sometimes his hands find my throat. He leaves after these episodes. To be alone. At least he doesn’t wander the streets, like some. Doesn’t get lost permanently. He always comes back. Till then, I live with the bats. They flutter their wings of skin against the screens, while I lie in bed, staring up at the ghost of a light.
TARA LYNN MASIH
Ella
ELLA: THEN
Ella likes things tiny. Tiny toy dishes, tiny dolls, tiny flowers. She even wants her dad to be tiny. Like the Incredible Shrinking Man she saw on the telly. He could live in her Lincoln Log Cabin. She would feed him a green pea on her tiny doll’s plate for supper.
Ella has a tiny pet. From her dad’s Ronson cigarette lighter, a flint. Red. Blowing the cylinder bead gently across the floor, she is taking it for a walk. It lives in a matchbox with tissue sheets and clover. Till it falls in a canyon between floorboards. He won’t give her another.
Ella’s father does not shrink to a point of control. He smokes, stares, strokes, rolls her around. She goes tiny and red to disappear in cracks.
ELLA: NOW
Ella spends too much time in bars these days. Neon light from Budweiser and Michelob beer signs washes over her. Different colors, depending on where you sit.
Ella is known for this small trick—she sits the flat end of a cigarette butt down on the bar top, so the tobacco burns on its own. She drinks more than smokes. The vapors curling up into the red-green neon haze. The live embers evolving into columns of cold ash. If someone breathes too hard, they collapse.
She strikes another match, then another, till five butts form a circle like Stonehenge . . . gray . . . silent. This reminds her of something she can’t quite hold on to when she wanders home, outside air black and stifling.
Her pastor once told her, transformation requires inspiration. She has forgotten.
RON CARLSON
Grief
The King died. Long live the King. And then the Queen died. She was buried beside him. The King died and then the Queen died of grief. This was the posted report. And no one said a thing. But you can’t die of grief. It can take away your appetite and keep you in your chamber, but not forever. It isn’t terminal. Eventually you’ll come out and want a toddy. The Queen died subsequent to the King, but not of grief. I know the royal coroner, have seen him around, a young guy with a good job. The death rate for the royalty is so much lower than that of the general populace. He was summoned by the musicians, found her on the bedroom floor, checked for a pulse, and wrote “Grief” on the form. It looked good. And it was necessary. It answered the thousand questions about the state of the nation. He didn’t examine the body, perform an autopsy. If he had, he wouldn’t have found grief. There is no place for grief in the body. He would have found a blood alcohol level of point one nine and he would have found a clot of improperly chewed tangerine in the lady’s throat which she had ingested while laughing. But this see
ms a fine point. The Queen is dead. Long live her grief. Long live the Duke of Reddington and the Earl of Halstar who were with me that night entertaining the Queen in her chambers. She was a vigorous sort. And long live the posted report which will always fill a royal place in this old kingdom.
AFTERWORD
Readers of New Micro may wonder what distinguishes these exceptionally short fictions from prose poems, since they occupy the same amount of space and employ similar means of address—sketch, parable, anecdote, fable, joke, letter, meditation, and so on. The classic test for telling the difference between fiction writers and poets at a cocktail party—fiction writers talk contracts, and agents, and money, while poets talk food—may not apply to those who call it a day at 300 words. No one gets rich writing micros.
Less is more: this is the currency of prose poetry and microfiction alike. They also share a border—the sentence—that from either side is subject to continual dispute and change. (The small wars of the literati never end.) Is this a prose poem or a micro? It hardly matters. Literary guides to uncertain terrain, this no-man’s-land, are always getting lost. Better to follow the intrepid explorers included in this anthology who navigate that border with exquisite care, distilling in exacting prose new ways of reading the world.
What have we here? A fable in the form of a news dispatch about a drive-by shooting. A portrait of a woman whose burning misery is, in her words, “the mystery of the incongruous.” A love story, and then another. Someone’s heart is breaking. Someone is taking dictation from the stars. A story begins to take shape. Listen closely. It will not last long, but it will haunt you forever.
—Christopher Merrill
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank our editor, Amy Cherry, for her steady guidance; Margaret Gorenstein, our invaluable permissions consultant; and Nat Sobel, our agent, for making the connections. Thanks also to our close associates who saw us all the way through and made all the difference: Diana Scott, Andrew Root, Denise Robinow, and Ron & Renee Geyer. And finally, enormous thanks to Pamela Painter and Meg Pokrass, who were there at the beginning.
BOOKS by the AUTHORS
The source books for the stories in New Micro are listed here first, followed by a selection of the authors’ other books, from newest to oldest.
Kim Addonizio: Jimmy & Rita (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2012); Mortal Trash (W. W. Norton, 2016); Bukowski in a Sundress (Penguin, 2016); The Palace of Illusions (Soft Skull Press, 2014).
Roberta Allen: Certain People (Coffee House Press, 1996); The Princess of Herself (Pelekinesis, 2017); The Dreaming Girl (Ellipsis Press, 2011); Amazon Dream (City Lights Publishers, 1992).
Steve Almond: This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey (DIY or DIE Press, 2010); God Bless America (Lookout Books, 2011); Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Random House, 2010); The Evil B. B. Chow (Algonquin Books, 2005).
Nin Andrews: Our Lady of the Orgasm (MadHat Press, 2017); Miss August (Cavenkerry, 2017); Why God Is a Woman (BOA Editions, 2015); Sleeping with Houdini (BOA Editions, 2008); Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane (Web del Sol, 2005).
Arlene Ang: Banned for Life (Misty Publications, 2014); Seeing Birds in Church Is a Kind of Adieu (Cinnamon Press, 2010); The Desecration of Doves (iUniverse, 2005).
Barry Basden: Used Rainbow (Red Dashboard, 2014); Wince (Camroc Press, 2015).
Lou Beach: 420 Characters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011); Cut It Out (Last Gasp, 2015).
Paul Beckman: Peek (Big Table Publishing Company, 2014); Maybe I Ought to Sit Quietly in a Dark Room for a While (Amazon Digital Services, 2013); Come, Meet My Family (Small Press Distribution, 1997).
Richard Brautigan: Revenge of the Lawn (Simon & Schuster, 1971); In Watermelon Sugar (Four Seasons Foundation, 1968); Trout Fishing in America (Four Seasons Foundation, 1967); A Confederate General from Big Sur (Grove Press, 1964).
Randall Brown: Mad to Live (Flume Press, 2008); A Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction (Matter Press, 2012).
Bonnie Jo Campbell: Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (W. W. Norton, 2015); Once Upon a River (W. W. Norton, 2012); American Salvage (W. W. Norton, 2009); Women & Other Animals (Scribner, 2002).
Ron Carlson: Room Service (Red Hen Press, 2012); The Blue Box (Red Hen Press, 2014); Return to Oakpine (Viking, 2013); Five Skies (Viking, 2007).
Kim Chinquee: Pretty (White Pine Press, 2010); Veer (Ravenna Press, 2017); Oh Baby (Ravenna Press, 2008).
James Claffey: Blood a Cold Blue (Press 53, 2013).
Amy L. Clark: Wanting appears in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press, 2008); Adulterous Generation (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016).
Bernard Cooper: Maps to Anywhere (University of Georgia Press, 1997); My Avant-Garde Education (W. W. Norton, 2015); The Bill from My Father (Simon & Schuster, 2007); Guess Again (Simon & Schuster, 2006).
Michael Czyzniejewski: Chicago Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2012); I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life (Curbside Splendor, 2015); Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books, 2009).
Gay Degani: Rattle of Want (Pure Slush Books, 2015); What Came Before (Every Day Novels, 2014); Pomegranate Stories (lulu.com, 2010).
Erin Dionne: Notes from an Accidental Band Geek (Puffin Books, 2012); The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet (Puffin Books, 2011); Models Don’t Eat Chocolate Cookies (Dial Books, 2009).
Stuart Dybek: Ecstatic Cahoots (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Paper Lantern (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Streets in Their Own Ink (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006); I Sailed with Magellan (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003).
Pia Z. Ehrhardt: Famous Fathers & Other Stories (MacAdam/Cage, 2007).
Elizabeth Ellen: Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix appears in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press, 2008); Person/a (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2017); Bridget Fonda (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2015); Fast Machine (Short Flight/Long Drive, 2012).
Grant Faulkner: Fissures: One Hundred 100-Word Stories (Press 53, 2015); Pep Talks for Writers (Chronicle Books, 2017).
Kathy Fish: Rift (Unknown Press, 2011); Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011); Laughter, Applause, Laughter, Music, Applause appeared in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press, 2008).
Sherrie Flick: Whiskey, Etc. (Autumn House, 2017); Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books, 2009); I Call This Flirting (Flume Press, 2004).
Thaisa Frank: Enchantment (Counterpoint, 2012); Heidegger’s Glasses (Counterpoint, 2011); Finding Your Writer’s Voice (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996); A Brief History of Camouflage (Black Sparrow Press, 1992).
Melissa Fraterrigo: Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017); The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press, 2011).
Stefanie Freele: Feeding Strays (Lost Horse Press, 2009); Surrounded by Water (Press 53, 2012).
Sarah Freligh: Sad Math (Moon City Press, 2015); A Brief Natural History of an American Girl (Accents Publishing, 2012); Sort of Gone (Turning Point, 2008).
Molly Giles: Bothered (Split Oak Press, 2012); All the Wrong Places (Lost Horse Press, 2015); Rough Translations (University of Georgia Press, 2004); Iron Shoes (Simon & Schuster, 2001).
Amelia Gray: AM/PM (Featherproof Books, 2009); Isadora (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017); Gutshot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); Museum of the Weird (Fiction Collective, 2010).
Kevin Griffith: Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange (Pearl Editions, 2008); 101 Kinds of Irony (Folded Word, 2012); Paradise Refunded (Backwaters Press, 1998).
Tom Hazuka: You Have Time for This (Ooligan Press, 2007); Flash Fiction Funny (Bluelight Press, 2013); Sudden Flash Youth (Persea, 2011); A Celestial Omnibus (Beacon Press, 1998).
Kyle Hemmings: Split Brain (CreateSpace, 2016); You Never Die in Wholes (Good Story Press, 2012).
Amy Hempel: Reasons to Live (HarperPerennial, 1995); The Dog of the Marriage (Scribner, 2005); At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (Knopf, 1990).
Tania Hershman: My Mother Was an Upright Piano (Tangent Books, 2012); Some of Us Glow More Than Others (Unthank Books, 2017); Terms and Condit
ions (Nine Arches Press, 2017); Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ and Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Jim Heynen: Why Would a Woman Pour Boiling Water on Her Head? (Trilobite Press, 2001); Ordinary Sins (Milkweed Editions, 2014); The Fall of Alice K. (Milkweed Editions, 2012); The One-Room Schoolhouse (Knopf, 1993).
Tiff Holland: Betty Superman (Rose Metal Press, 2011).
Louis Jenkins: Just Above Water (Holy Cow! Press, 1999); In the Sun Out of the Wind (Will o’ the Wisp Press, 2017); Tin Flag (Will o’ the Wisp Books, 2013); Before You Know It (Will o’ the Wisp Books, 2009).
Roy Kesey: All Over (Dzanc Books, 2007); Any Deadly Thing (Dzanc Books, 2013); Pacazo (Dzanc Books, 2011); Nothing in the World (Dzanc Books, 2008).
Ron Koertge: Sex World (Red Hen Press, 2014); Vampire Planet (Red Hen Press, 2016); Coaltown Jesus (Candlewick, 2013); Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses (Candlewick, 2012).
Len Kuntz: I’m Not Supposed to Be Here and Neither Are You (Unknown Press, 2016).
Jeff Landon: Truck Dance (Matter Press, 2011); Emily Avenue (Fast Forward Press, 2011).
Tara Laskowski: Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons (Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2017); Bystanders (Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2016); SmokeLong: The Best of the First Ten Years (Matter Press, 2014).
Lorraine López: The Realm of Happy Spirits (Grand Central Publishing, 2011); Homicide Survivors Picnic (BkMk Press, 2009); The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters (Grand Central Publishing, 2008).