Flash! Four Works of Micro-Fiction

Editor’s Note: While most of the stories we receive and publish are between one thousand and five thousand words, today’s online feature presents four flash stories ranging from 844 to just 266 words. Inhabiting the rich borderland between poetry and prose, these stories combine compression and narrative in a form that, author Dana Wall says, “effectively captures the compressed intensity of war” and its aftermath.

The sharp focus and brevity of “The House,” for example, mimics “the probing, disinterested flash of a news camera upon every intimate detail of the house before discarding it, as the daily news cycle moves on to the next horror,” author Adi Dvir explains. In “The Translator’s Daughter,” Wall says she chose the flash form because it “mirrors the fragmented nature of immigrant identity and historical trauma.”

The experience of war and geopolitical violence is also, at its core, one of removal and of physical and cultural annihilation, which is embodied literally in the empty walls in “The Last Museum Guard in Kyiv.” And “Sea of Wheat,” which author Andrea Jurjević says initially began as “images of a displaced brother and sister holding memories of war in their bodies,” needed to stay small “to operate on the level of suggestion rather than comprehensiveness.” The power of these stories comes as much from what is not said as what is said. In the deliberate omission of a larger narrative, “absence speaks the unspeakable.”*

—Elizabeth Lukács Chesla, Fiction Editor

*Lori Ann Stephens, quoted in The Art of Brevity by Grant Faulkner, University of New Mexico Press, 2023.

***

Anna counts her footsteps as she walks through darkened galleries—fourteen from Repin to Aivazovsky, twenty-three to the Malevich, thirty-six to the room where the Shevchenko portraits were rolled into acid-free tubes three days ago. Her flashlight beam catches the empty frames like windows into darkness. In the basement, crates of paintings sleep between sandbags while air raid sirens paint their portraits in sound.

She remembers bringing her granddaughter here last summer, the girl’s finger tracing just close enough to set off her “Don’t touch!” reflex. “But Babusya, look—the light in the water!” A small finger points to Aivazovsky’s waves. Now those waves rest in a climate-controlled bunker while real explosions light the real sky.

Her son calls twice daily. “Come stay with us in Lviv.” But someone must walk these halls, must check the humidity monitors, must remember where each masterpiece lived before the walls were stripped. Someone must stay to tell them how to rebuild it all, piece by piece, when this is over.

Tonight she sleeps on her office floor, coat pulled tight against the cold. In her dreams, painted figures step from their frames to warm themselves by her small space heater. Cossacks share coffee from her thermos. Peasant girls with red headscarves sweep away shell casings. She wakes to distant explosions, counts her breaths like footsteps. Fourteen. Twenty-three. Thirty-six.

In the morning, she will walk her rounds again. She will check each empty frame, each humidity monitor, and each sandbag fortress. She will remember each painting’s place, keeping their ghosts alive in these halls until they can come home again.

***

My father taught me English through American action movies, pausing every few minutes to explain idioms. I watched Die Hard when I was seven, Terminator 2 when I was nine. “See?” he’d say. “This is what they mean by hasta la vista.” Now he works as a cultural advisor at Fort Benning, teaching soldiers the proper way to say thank you in Dari and how to accept tea without offending.

I watch Kabul fall on CNN while doing homework at our kitchen table in Columbus, Georgia. The news anchor says “deteriorating situation,” and I hear my father’s voice: “This is what they mean by understatement.” The screen shows people running across the tarmac, clinging to plane wheels, falling. I calculate time zones, gravity, and the weight of desperation.

My best friend Mackenzie asks if I’m okay. How to explain that I’m watching my parallel life dissolve? That somewhere in another universe, I’m still in Kabul, that I never made it to this American kitchen with its homework and CNN and infinite clean water? That every person running across that tarmac is my might-have-been self?

Dad comes home late, smelling of coffee and PowerPoint presentations. He watches the same footage I’ve been watching all day. “This is what they mean by history repeating,” he doesn’t say, but I hear it anyway. His phone buzzes with messages from people he translated for, people who trusted American promises. He makes calls, writes emails, pulls whatever strings his fifteen years of service can reach.

Tonight we’ll eat pizza and watch Die Hard again, our private ritual of American normalcy. He’ll pretend not to check his phone between scenes. I’ll pretend not to notice him wiping his eyes when he thinks I’m focused on the movie. We’ll both pretend we can’t hear Kabul falling, falling, like bodies from wheel wells, like promises from altitude, like the words he taught me for things we never thought we’d need to say.

***

December | Andrea Jurjević

Petra and Jakov speak more slowly than the locals, their vowels longer, emphasis on the first syllable. They never use h in their speech, so the word hrana—food—becomes rana—wound. Their speaking is measured, considered. But a visitor would never know that because the two are quiet people who often keep to themselves. And even the locals, who speak in a low, consonant-clipped sputter, tend to be busy listening to their own voices.

Jakov takes regular walks along the shore, one in the morning and one at the end of the day. In the evenings, he carries his fishing rod and stops at a craggy beach. Some days Ivo, who is eight, rides his bike down the path along the shore. When he gets to Jakov’s spot, he leans his bike on the cypress by the path and runs down the rocks to watch Jakov fish. The two of them have a way of leaning into a shared quiet that makes words redundant. Ivo nods at Jakov and sits next to him. Jakov rolls a pale piece of bread around the fishhook. The boy hugs his scabby knees and watches. As Jakov swings the fishing rod out toward the horizon, red like the slit throat of a hog, they listen to the sea lap against the rocks.

The locals don’t know how Petra spends her days. Many of them learned long ago to keep busy with daily chores, preparing for the tourist season when they will make a little money to tide them through the winter. They see her walk down from her cabin mid-morning, past the church, to the market. She buys a loaf of bread, a little meat from the butcher, and vegetables from the stand, then walks back up to their home, straight-backed and tall.

A visitor wouldn’t think that thirty years ago she and Jakov lived inland. That at the time, summer had already surrendered to fall. That the fields surrounding the small Slavonian town were all flax and rust, the sky above them a low and heavy expanse. That in the distance, the Sava ran quiet as a thief. That it was dusk. That the cows and pigs were asleep in the barn. That behind their boarded-up windows, Jakov, Petra, and their parents sat on the couch in their pajamas and slippers and watched the evening news. That the boxy television, with a handmade lace doily on top, reported grenades falling across the Sava. Or that minutes later, they ran in those same slippers from their neighbors’ knives.

A visitor wouldn’t know that their hometown was razed. That, in the absence of their remains, their parents were declared missing. That Jakov and Petra were taken to the coast, hundreds of kilometers from their home. That they were given a tiny cabin to live in, one of those prefab tourist rentals, to which Petra is walking right now. A visitor wouldn’t know how to read her measured pace. Whether her head held high is a matter of confidence or vigilance. Whether, regardless of her gait, she’s still running, running like lightning through a golden field of wheat. Whether the whoosh of wheat still fills her ears.

***

The Garden | Adi Dvir

Shockwaves hit the windows first, rattling the glass. The little earthquakes arrive every hour on average, or according to the generosity of the long-shafted tanks. Occasional machine-gun fire sounds like impatient knocking at the front door.

The filigreed gate is splayed open, hung with a faded flag. In the garden, unholy nature reigns. Blackened bodies of dead pomegranates dangle from branches resplendent with young leaves. Hummingbirds plunge their tiny scythes into the throats of the fuchsia flowers, and jacaranda buds shoot up through white starbursts of jasmine heaving their last, sickly-sweet sighs. Afternoon rays tremble on the fronds of a hanging fern trying to root itself in sunlight. They pounce upon the newborn flesh of a rocktrumpet blossom, roll over a stiff-leafed banana plant, then drown themselves in the crevices of some old shells strung up from the lamppost. Brown weeds poke through the clover, dead arms outstretched and shivering in the warm breeze. Tiny butterflies flit low among them, corpse-white and unextravagant, barely large enough to merit a shadow.

Through the first door to the right is the master bedroom, with a private bath. Towels starched with desert dust hang stiffly from their rack; the toilet water has evaporated. Grey cotton pajamas peek from beneath one of the pillows on the half-made bed. A pair of crocs face each other at awkward angles; the stern gaze of an upright reading lamp falls on a tissue wilting in its box.

On the left bedside table is an overturned tome, spine somehow still unbroken. La Reconquista: Proceso de la Restauracion Democratica en Uruguay (1980-1990), its cover says. Opposite the bed, a silk shirt—mustard—is draped inside-out across the back of a slatted wooden chair. A safety pin holds the place of a yellow flower-petal button, though the spare that came with the shirt is still attached to the tag.

On the wall next to the bathroom hang the photos of three girls in matching frames. They have the same smile but otherwise look nothing alike. Bone structure is most prominent in the eldest, who is thinner than her sisters, though from the refrigerator magnets it is possible to discern that she has gained some weight since giving birth.

On the sideboard in the living room is a childhood photo of the girls seated on a blue velvet couch. The youngest is six, maybe seven, in this picture, and she lies draped across her sisters’ laps, one arm dangling. The middle one has bangs she’s most likely grown to despise. Perhaps she is embarrassed by this picture, or perhaps she just finds it amusing.

Another photograph on the sideboard has lost nearly all its color, although it is more recent. In it, the eldest daughter reclines against her groom, who hugs her from behind in classic wedding picture pose. The bride’s hair, long as a mermaid’s, cascades down her husband’s arm in soft blond waves. The husband’s eyes are vulnerable, in this picture, tuxedoed shoulders hunched forward to encircle his bride. His lips are almost too soft, and slightly parted, as though emitting a long and troubled sigh.

In a way, the house is lucky. It is not burned or riddled with holes, like some other houses not too far away. Busloads of tourists have no reason to penetrate its solitude. Its walls are not spray-painted with the words human remains on the . . . , nor does it have any inkling of the possibility of a baby in an oven. The only blood smears it sustains are remnants of slapped mosquitoes, and aside from a fine layer of dust and a discarded pantyliner behind the toilet in the common bath, there is nothing unseemly within its walls.

The safe room contains no photos, no decor of any kind. The reinforced concrete walls are staunchly white in the fluorescent lighting, which lends them an unearthly sheen. In one corner is a sack of old clothes ready for donation. Plastic vessels overflow from a garbage bag resting on a schoolchild’s desk, beside a lifeless black computer screen. A baby doll—eyes shut, until someone cares to lift it—reclines in a bassinet painted to match its teal-and-white striped pajamas, cherubic face warped and wrinkled by a plastic shroud.

In a way, the house is unlucky, for it cannot leave. It can only sit waiting, as they say, for the messiah. Its owners, meanwhile, have moved to the backside of a massive complex overlooking the stubborn, swaying sea. Their apartment faces a dirt parking lot crowded with cars and weeds; sometimes a loud flock of crows alights, hunting for shiny scraps of garbage.

From the kitchen window the mother watches—for she is accustomed to rising with the sun—as pale rays creep across the mist-laden lot and insinuate themselves into the gleaming metal fixtures of her new life. Beyond the lot the highway overpass is never pacified, its rocketing steel hot and sharp as shrapnel in the glare of the great ball of fire in the sky, getting larger and larger by the second, coming to engulf the world.