I’m doing procedural things at eleven p.m. in the dim yellow light of the forward galley. It’s not sound-proofed. No carpets. Lots of kitchenware, metal and plastic. In the old days the gals wore heels in here. Clacked around. No longer. Elegance was lost in a world of foam rubber soles.
Tired, getting schitzy and ready to get back to base. It was crazy. My suicidal sister came to mind. Andrea. Annie. Turns out the all-Amerikan girl was a sweet con. A real shrewd homecoming queen. Had her babies before 21 and by forty was hell on wheels, super-pretty super-bitch looking out for numero uno. The new Andrea became Andréa. She put her legs in the air, earning her way up to status and money and then took a guy twenty years younger, someone like a builder, but with the reliable big equipment she craved. Married him. Got a place by the lake, a boat, extra places to live. Conspired profits. Laundered money from bad sources. Escalating fucked-up-ness.
It was all muy extravagante and a bit mafioso. The law came eventually.
Coke became a larger part of it. The lingerie got wilder. She went first-name basis with the handsome local cosmetic surgeon. Then the DA called one evening via detectives at the door. Then a grand jury. She battled until her money and luck ran out, then fled to Ireland and one foggy day said fuck extradition immunity anyway and jumped off a cliff.
I am her younger sis Janey, easy on the eyes as well. You may have run into me at the best places in New York. Or in a cantina in Mexico City. A cafe in Zurich or on the dance floor in Ibiza. Hey, I never hang out in Nowheresville.
OCUPADO sign goes on and off to my left. With the throw of a bolt. My agenda and my heart opens and shuts.
A shiny pot of burned Melita Colombian coarse-grind clicks off, still aromatic. The red light replacing the green. Below there are the usual rattles and flight-noises from the array of warming lockers, a comforting harmonic. The tray ovens are strac and lined up hup-two. They have been empty since the bankruptcy.
A bilingual dictionary is on the small formica counter, wrinkled from use and page-stained.
Lance found a bug in an oven earlier during the first-class cookie bake. He squealed. He does that. It’s funny to see a uniformed man freak out. We have pills and free mini-bottles to help all types.
Our engines changed pitch. We’re in the pattern. I notice the view changes in the Emer door porthole. I can see buildings, grids and blocks, and vast plains of lights. The view extends farther when the pilot banks, showing off this sentimental sight of Amerika after dark.
The smell of our cabin air changes from pressurized to real. The permeated odors of coffee and first-class chocolate chip cookies go away, and I begin to imagine I can smell the people. Sort of like canvas sneakers and overworked talc.
I grab the mike for a routine announcement, hesitant to step even two paces outside the warm galley, my Somewheresville.
Month: December 2025
CIRCA 1956 IN SOUTH CAROLINA
Late summer. Bluejays squawked in bellicose tones distinctively bluejay, ganging up in trees in the median parkway of Florence Street.
Out back, chickens wandered in a pen, wheezy and trepidatious. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in his perfect way that chickens sound asthmatic)
A eucalyptus tree a century-old stood by a tall lawn spigot with brick splashguards. In the grass were faded sticks from an old croquet set. An antique gun workshop hid behind a bamboo grove. A homemade motor boat slept in a back shed. Broken-down polo mallets tacked up to bare studs. Farther away a defunct camper trailer, a wrecked rowboat, on flats of sandy dirt loaded with red ants.
After lunch Neapolitan ice cream out of the carton. The strawberry section had bits of fruit, tart to balance the sweet. Lots of infants and grade school cousins occupied the house. Among the adults, concerns about baby formula and potty training ran below their everyday kitchen conversations.
The uncles were comics. Midday meal, the big one, had prayer, ha ha.
Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.
An afternoon car ride in gramma’s Buick if you were nice. The heat pounding down on the way back. 8oz Coke bottles from the icebox. Rules required you read aloud the city of origin imprinted on the bottom. A sack of boiled peanuts, chilled, always on the top rack.
Nighttime we ate again but ate light, like leftover bread, biscuits, doctored-up casseroles. Sliced tomatoes from the yard.
Retiring to the family room, we saw the golden clocks that moved silently inside inverted glass jars. A floor fan hummed.
The night heat was heavy and still.
From the cabinet TV, Adlai Stevenson’s summer convention speech played loud. Mixed support. An ancient magnolia tree loomed outside like a giant.
Windows were opened cautiously. Everyone was afraid of black people.
Fresh-Squeezed Fiction
originally posted April 2013
In his recent interview on PBS, Philip Roth made a passing comment about Saul Bellows’ late-in-life shift to writing short novels. He described the form as a novel in which the author chooses to condense a storyline rather than expand it. For an aging writer who is being efficient with the energies he has left, the short form is logical, Roth admitted. But something in his tone seemed to indicate he was less than convinced about the short form’s artistic merits, or if it was his vehicle of choice.
My mixed bag of reactions:
If the online literary journals are to be believed , writing compressed fictional pieces (flash fiction) is revolutionary and the future. Most posted flash vignettes are often less than 1000 words; some less than 500; and in some cases they are limited to three or six sentences. I recently saw a micro-fiction contest with ten words max. It’s like a Battle of Cleverness.
Flash fiction is an internet product, a celebration of economy of scope, style and narration. And I may as well throw in poetic devices, too. It’s fast reading, read fast by rapid-decision editors for fast webzines for digestion by fast-moving users with fast iPads in our fast and compressed modern times, etcetera.
But at the core of the product itself, the modus operandi of flash fiction is not really new nor revolutionary. It’s not that far removed from, say, what Hemingway was doing in “Hills Like White Elephants.” Or Brautigan was doing almost fifty years ago in “Trout Fishing in America.”
Flash fiction strives for pure, lean impact. To be evocative and as far from exhaustive as possible. Unfortunately many flash fiction pieces tend to sound strained, over-manipulated, ambiguous, or fall into the “way too precious” trap. The ones in present tense (and/or second person You) are especially cloying, like someone boring us with a breathless dream account. Yet some are real gems that carry a sparkle no matter how many re-reads, and these rise above those done by magic tricks with words that wow momentarily then are forgotten.
What the proponents of flash fiction don’t show or even broach on their sites, and for expedience sake can’t, is how this new direction of less is better affects the novel form.
What is a short novel? There are the usual suspects as examples, masterpieces like Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” Pynchon’s “Crying of Lot 49,” Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Or some will include “The Great Gatsby” or “Catcher in the Rye.” The difference is, if we go with the generally accepted figure of 50,000 words plus equals a novel, those last two don’t count as short novels. But they do achieve an end by the same means: streamlining the story and its delivery in a highly artful and stylized way. Another that comes to mind, a personal favorite, is Rick Barthelme’s “Tracer,” a masterfully written short novel that is seamless and presented without a sense of author’s effort.
Within this venture of writing by contraction, there are many toolsets available at a writer’s disposal.
Kurt Vonnegut could present a novel with expansive action and concepts via his genius of writing pithy sentences and employing white space. His thing was stylistic compression, an economy of words and syntax more than an abbreviation of storyline. “So it goes.”
Dave Eggers does it the other way, at the highest level, with a compressed storyline in “Hologram for a King.” The scope of actual drama of time and place are limited (similar to Camus’ “The Stranger”). The payoff comes in character portrayal and mood that feels more like theatre than a bound book.
I love to read Roberto Bolaño because so many of his sentences are crafted to be interesting and filled with story. It is their density, their PSI that draws me in. I can read one of his short stories (and sometimes even just a page of one) and feel as if I’ve read a novel (cf. “The Insufferable Gaucho”). He transmits an enormous amount of information in a sentence. There are enough particularities to keep things visual and us the readers engaged. But there is no fluff, none of the vast amount of description (“the twittering birds”) and development we run across in a 500-page novel.
Each has its merits, the expansive and the brief. Was Roth hinting at something else? What defines a short novel? Is it tailored to today’s impatient and jaded reader? Will flash fiction influence its presentation and what this new breed of insta-readers want? Is there something new going on with short novels? A new sub-genre yet to evolve?
(to be revisited)
williampelotmoore.com 