When I saw this photograph, taken at the Bedford Avenue L subway station in Brooklyn yesterday morning, I had to run through all the possible scenarios as to why a pair of perfectly good gold heels was splayed on the tracks. Below, see my imagining. What do you think happened?

*photo credit: Joe Gallagher, 2009

It had been a long night. Evan wouldn’t even look at her, so Brittney kept drinking PBRs–seven, to be exact, but she lost count around 4. The other girls were all slung over their bike messenger rockstar wannabe boyfriends, their arms protectively crossed over their concave chests like the straps of those messenger bags they always wear. Her gold platforms, which seemed so perfect when she was getting dressed, seem ridiculous now, in this dank basement bar, full of Converse sneakers and combat boots. In the graffitied bathroom mirror, her eyes are lost in a smudgy cloud of eyeliner and mascara. The straps of her dress keep falling down.

Apparently, the look works, because one of the wannabes, complete with leather jacket and skinny jeans, is buying her beers now, putting his hand possessively on her hip. It’s a long way back to Astoria, and her platforms are... more »

This week’s exercise is based on Chuck Rosenthal’s “The Nicest Kid in the Universe,” found on p. 152 of the book Flash Fiction, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka.

The Superlative Exercise

Analysis:

“The Nicest Kid in the Universe,” is a parable about Franky Gorky, the titular child, for although he is the “nicest” kid, “he wasn’t the smartest kid.” Because Gorky isn’t smart, he doesn’t realize that the moon waxes and wanes on its own; he believes that his wishes are responsible for this, a fact which leads him to run across the street on Christmas morning as his grandmother is parking across the street, and get “rubbed out” by a drunk driver. The story ends with the introduction of a first person narrator and a moral, as if it has been told to frighten a child into good behavior. The story ends with these lines:

That’s what happens, said my father, when people take other people’s parking places.

That’s what happens, said my mother, when you don’t look both ways

What happens is, if you’re the nicest kid in the whole universe, then you have to die.

This is what happens when you try to explain something.

Exercise:

Write a story of a few... more »

My response to last week’s “Restrained Impulse” exercise is below. I have to say, I’m not sure I hewed as close to the exercise as I could have. I wanted to present the story of a gang flunky who couldn’t keep from laughing as a way of replicating Robert Hill Long’s dynamic of a small girl who couldn’t keep from dancing. A flaw in the story, I think, is that my main character doesn’t have a strong relationship with a single person, as Long’s girl does with her father. He also feels a little generic to me. I’m hoping these are problems I can address through revision, but since it’s already Wednesday, and in the spirit of making my process transparent, here’s what I came up with:

The Neighborhood

Even when the boy was young, he knew that laughter meant survival. He lived in the projects with his mom and his little sister, and they used to laugh together in front of the television, or watching the neighbors out the window, mocking their outfits from nine floors above. They laughed about the broken elevators in their building, or poor Ms. Fernandez on the first floor, who came up to their apartment with her daughters... more »

I can’t believe it’s Thursday already. This week’s exercise is based on Robert Hill Long’s “The Restraints,” found on p. 131 of the book Flash Fiction, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka.

The Restrained Impulse Exercise

Analysis:

“The Restraints” is about a little girl with an uncontrollable urge to dance that begins as a hunger. Long begins, “Even when she was very little her hunger was worth something: hunger taught her to dance, and her father noticed.” The title refers to the fact that when she was a child her father “tied a rope from her ankle to his ankle at night” to protect his “livelihood” from running off. Many years later, dying, she is tied to a hospital bed, even as her feet continue to knock against the footboard as she remembers the dances, which represent her moment of “having everything.” The piece ends with a more metaphorical notion of restraint, lying in her hospital bed, “when she closes her eyes now she knows who it is, tied to her on the narrow bed.”

Exercise:

Write a story of two or three pages in which the protagonist has an uncontrollable urge to perform a physical activity in order to survive (it is... more »

Here’s my response to last week’s Meta Exercise. Since Julio Cortázar used a narrative piece of art, a novel, to construct his excellent short short. I thought I’d give myself a challenge and try to do the same thing with a less experiential sort of art, in this case, sculpture. Points to anyone who can identify the sculptor.

Daphne

Inside the museum, she allowed herself to be politely interested in the art, the pale statues he loved so much, David twisting back his arm, a grim set to his mouth, Poseidon’s hand against Persephone’s thigh, hands sunk into the cool marble as if it were a marshmallow. He had arranged for this private trip to the museum; he had paid for their first class plane tickets to Rome, but that was to be expected.

At first, she’d found his attentions in the bar where she worked flattering but overwhelming. His lavish words and gifts masked a paucity of spirit, a blindness, an inability to admire things for anything more than the surface.

At his request, their guide left them in a small room at one corner of the museum. He had wanted to look at a particular sculpture, by themselves, in the quiet. Her... more »

Last week I neglected the blog due to a family emergency, but this week I’m back with a short-short exercise based on Julio Cortázar’s “A Continuity of Parks,” found on p. 137 of the book Flash Fiction, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka.

The Meta Exercise

Analysis:

“A Continuity of Parks,” begins with a rich man who is allowing himself to become engrossed in a book. As the narrative progresses, the vivid dream of the novel becomes literal for the man, and he thinks himself into the story, circling the narrative back on itself. Cortázar’s protagonist imagines that he is sneaking into a mansion to kill his lover’s husband, when he arrives in the mansion, knife in hand, he sees himself in an armchair reading a book. Cortázar is essentially exploring literature’s power to literally take the reader outside of him- or herself, and the divisions between real life and fantasy life. Furthermore, the narrative suggests that the story inside the book is relevant to the protagonist’s life, that perhaps, he has a wife who is cheating on him, who wishes him dead.

Exercise:

Write a story in which the protagonist becomes engrossed in a film, painting, book or other piece of art... more »

All right, I’m no Margaret Atwood, but here’s my (somewhat belated) stab at last week’s Cubist Exercise. It’s a start.

Soap

Imagine a bar of soap lying by the side of your sink. It’s a flat, creamy beige block no bigger than a deck of cards, with edges that aren’t quite plumb, smoothed by hand and water. You made it from skin-scarring lye and olive oil in the pot you use to make soup, carefully weighing the ingredients on a postal scale, and whirring them together with a hand blender, watching carefully for the signs of miraculous alchemy, the puddingy texture, the marks on the surface that stay turgid for a moment before vanishing. You poured the soap into a shoebox mold, and cured it in the open air for a month, to remove its green bite.

This soap is anti-corporate. All its glycerine is intact, compared to the stuff so easy to buy at the store. In a stroke of marketing genius, companies sell you soap that robs skin of its moisture, then offer the the glycerin back to your dry hands in various lotions and creams.

Imagine the industrial soap used to clean up after suicides, the blood from a gunshot wound... more »

I’m embarking on an ambitious project to write 24 short shorts.

For those of you who don’t know, a short short, also called flash fiction or micro-fiction is a short story of as few as 200 words or as many as 2,000. It’s bite-sized fiction or nonfiction. Fringe publishes them, as do many journals, but Quick Fiction is famous for publishing excellent flash fiction of 500 words or less exclusively.

My idea is this: on Tuesdays, I’ll read a short short and post an exercise intended to mimic that story. The following Tuesday I’ll publish my version. I should be writing a new short short every two weeks, and I invite you, dear reader, to read and write with me.

The exercises will be done Pam-Painter style. In the first graf I’ll explain how I think the story at hand works, and in the second graf, I’ll break down the assignment.

Here’s this week’s exercise, based on the Margaret Atwood story “Bread,” found on p. 198 of the book Flash Fiction, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka.

The Cubist Exercise

Analysis:

In “Bread,” Margaret Atwood takes a concrete object, bread, and views it through multiple lenses. The story has five different sections, each that asks the reader to... more »