Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories James Thomas and Robert Shapard, eds. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2006 237 pp.  Trade Paperback.  $15.95

Flash Fiction Forward, a new anthology of flash fiction edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard, brings together eighty “very short” stories, defined by the editors as stories of 750 words or less.  As this excellent and varied anthology shows, the adage that there are many ways to tell a story holds true even when you add “in three pages.”  Or two pages, for that matter, or one, or even a single sentence, as Gary D. Wilson accomplishes in his story “Sweet Sixteen,” which originally appeared in Quick Fiction. Wilson’s story unreels with a graceful acceleration, carrying us from an adolescent kiss in a car to the characters’ separate adult lives in a single sustained breath.

Thomas and Shapard have co-edited several other flash fiction collections.  Their keen editorial judgment, honed over more than a decade of assembling very short stories, recognizes the range of possibilities the form presents.  One of the pleasures of reading their forwards is encountering their musings on these possibilities, and testing those musings against the collected stories.  Here, Thomas and Shapard quote Richard Bausch as saying of flash fiction: “when a story is compressed so much, the matter of it tends to require more size: that is, in order to make it work in so small a space its true subject matter must be proportionately large.”  This is certainly true of Bausch’s story, the quietly rendered “1951,” which is told from the perspective of a seven-year-old girl who perceives more than she can say as she watches her widowed father, a minister, deal with – and cause – tragedy.

Other stories also tackle weighty subject matter.  “Drawer,” by Rick Moody, is a funny and sad portrait of a marriage’s dissolution.  Michael Martone’s “Diagnostic Drift,” composed of numbered vignettes, tells of a couple’s struggle to have a child by describing the woman’s four pregnancies, each of which progresses further than the last before ending in miscarriage.  The story ends with the heartbreaking lines, “I know right now you are being questioned.  An aide is asking questions and writing your answers onto forms she keeps in a file.  Your history is being worked up.  This happened and this happened and this happened and then this.”  Amy Hempel’s “What Were the White Things” employs a similarly matter-of-fact tone to explore loss and mortality – the narrator’s own illness, as well as her mother’s death – by forging associations between “white things” the narrator notices and remembers and the white spots on the film her radiologist shows her.

Humor in flash fiction is at its most piercing when it’s darkest.  The reader measures the gap between what is said and what is meant, and umbrella-like, the story’s larger implications open before us.  Such is the case with Ander Monson’s chilling and funny “To Reduce Your Likelihood of Murder.”  With pitch-perfect mimicry, Monson channels a number of institutional voices – the advisory brochure, the instruction manual, TV’s cautionary talking-heads – to expose our culture’s hysteria and contradictions:  “Do not venture out in public (at night, alone).  Do not stay at home.  Do not wear black.  Do not wear the dress your boyfriend likes so much.  Do not date your boyfriend whom you like so much.  Do not like so much.”  The story’s litany of warnings and orders tells us to do the impossible, but, with a fatalism both terrifying and liberating, ends by assuring us, “Still you will be killed.  You’re born for it.  Your life is a tree meant to be torn apart by weather and electricity.”

Chrystos’s “Traditional Style Indian Garage” also mines institutional language for darkly comic effect.  The “traditional style Indian garage,” the story’s narrator says, is “very easy to replicate, if you are working on your Girl or Boy Scout merit badge in crafts.  Scout around for a strong, extra-thick, large trash bag with no holes.  Black is the preferred color, but many tribes have assimilated the dark green ones.  Place this over the sunroof, making sure to go past all the seams.  Weigh this down in the four corners with logs and bricks.  If you’d like you may sing a little song to the Beaver Nation.”  The garage can be converted into a coat, the narrator tells us, a usage “particularly prevalent among the urban homeless tribes, who have also revived the new health trend for sleeping outside in all weather.”

Not all the stories here are dark or tragic, however.  Several lightly comic offerings provide a different kind of pleasure.  Culled from the pages of The New Yorker and Esquire, these stories entertain by sending up the humorlessness of bureaucracies, the confessional tell-all, and the public TV and radio fundraiser.  Peter Mehlman’s “Mandela Was Late” is told from the perspective of Nelson Mandela’s cranky parole officer.  Jack Handey’s “The Voices in My Head” gives us a narrator who believes he’s hearing voices when in fact he’s simply hearing his own thoughts, and Patricia Marx’s “Pledge Drive” stages a pledge drive for a spoiled and self-absorbed woman named Patty.  The reader is urged to support Patty financially because “Patty’s operating expenses have gone up and up – never more so than this year, because the cost of fancy skin creams, designer leather jackets, and other essential goods has risen disproportionately to the rate of inflation.  And Patty wants to go to Istanbul in April.”

In their editors’ note, Thomas and Shapard write that the success of very short stories depends upon the stories’ “depth, clarity of vision and human significance.”  The same could be said of any literary fiction genre – the short story, the novella, the novel – but to claim it for the very short story, too long dismissed as anecdotal or reliant on tricks, is to recognize and assert the form’s best potential.  If there is one thing the collected stories of Flash Fiction Forward show, it’s that flash fiction is amply capable of achieving all three.