Top 50

An awfully nice thing: Darlin Neal and Scott Garson of Wigleaf have put together a list of their fifty favorite Very Short Fictions from the past year, and saw fit to include a piece of mine, "Flies," which originally appeared in Hobart. This tickles me, not in the bad sense where you can't breathe and then whiz down your own leg, but in the other sense, the good one.

Not that anyone has reason to care, but a thing about this story: it could just as well be called nonfiction. I mean that literally. Nothing in it didn't happen except the fantasy bits labeled truthfully as fantasy, plus also the fictional bits labeled truthfully within the story as fiction. That said, so much of the story is composed of those two elements that, sure, why not: fiction.

Or, no, hold on, how about:

Blobfiction, greenish, and transparent enough that inside it you can see the slowly dissolving hunks of nonfiction it just ate.

Yes, I like that just fine.

May 6, 2009, 3:09 p.m.Categories: Litmags, Short Stories