Flash Friday 3-7-14 Fat cat, book of mormon EDIT in Flash Friday

In his room there is a photograph. There is an inch of black matte behind the photograph and a simple thin silver colored frame. A pane of glass covers the photograph. The glass is spotless. The photograph is of two elderly people. They are sitting on separate twin beds as in a hotel room. Both are facing the camera. The man is wearing suspenders and his shoulders are hunched. Each has a marshmallow in their open right palms. The photograph is black and white.

“I like that.”

“You do?”

“The photograph.”

“Oh.”

She tilts her head and smiles at him. He is painfully aware that a strange girl is in his room. He finds her very attractive. It only makes him more painfully aware that she is in his room and is strange. No girl has been in his room; not this room. There is a party going on in the rest of the apartment. He has stayed in his room because he is shy, perhaps, he thinks, he has some sort of social anxiety disorder. It’s not unusual for party guests to wander about the space a party is in, he thinks. She has not come to this room to have sex with you, he thinks. He is angry at himself for thinking that. Also, he thinks, in a kinder and softer tone, she is not here to poke at your shyness.

“Is it yours?”

“Pardon?”

“Did you take the photograph? It’s … unusual.”

“Um, no, I bought it from a man. He had a fat cat. Maybe the cat just had a lot of hair. I don’t know many cats.” She tilted her head again and smiled. He thought it was an endearing habit. It made him sad. It’s that way in the beginning, he thought, it’s an endearing habit, something you notice about her that makes her special to you, later, afterwards, it’s the thing you despise, it’s an affectation, a pretension.

“Are you ok?”

“What?”

“You said you didn’t know many cats and then …”

“Oh. Sorry. He wanted to sell me a book of Mormon too, I asked why, and he said because he was moving. That wasn’t what I meant, but I just said that I wasn’t interested but that I wanted the photograph.”

She tilted her head and smiled, “I like it.”

EDIT

We don’t say we like our own flashes. I don’t say I like my own flashes. It’s bad form and often it’s true; I don’t like my own flashes. I say I like your flashes. Sometimes it’s true, often what I mean is that I like that you are doing your own flashes. I’m a true believer in the flash.

I like this flash, my own, this one. I like it. I like it for other reasons than I like other things I have written. I liked love poems I wrote as a younger man because I liked being a guy who wrote love poems. I liked one of the novels I wrote because it was good. I liked most of the reports I wrote because they were effective, a means to an end that I believed in. I’ve liked some entries I’ve written because they were true or funny or because they will remind me of what I was like at a certain time and a certain place.

I like this flash because, at least at the moment, without too much thought, I think it would harder to explain this flash in fewer words. Because it has so many things happening in it that a fair synopsis would be longer than the flash. I don’t prize complexity; it’s closer to the truth to say I prize brevity. Sometimes. What I prize most in art that I find myself drawn back to over the years, though, isn’t the brevity or the complexity, it’s being open to interpretation. You look at a painting like, say, whistlers drawn old mother sitting in a rocking chair in a fairly Spartan room and it means something different depending on your mood. There are no complex hidden ‘easter eggs’ and it’s not a short sketch.

Yes, I understand, a great deal of that is me, the beholder. You must understand that is only so because I named the painting. You as the beholder have another example. If we ignore the empirical part, the example itself, we are exactly the same in this. The poetry we like, if in fact you even like poetry, always does this. It’s much simpler and more direct, for instance, to say “The world gets uglier as you grow old, and boring, and I fucking hate it” than for Eliot to go into all that shit about balding pate’s, coffee spoons, yellow fog and women discussing the artist and, by implication, not the art. I pick love song of j Alfred prufrock because it’s familiar, because it was on my mind recently, because I had to pick an example.

This flash, I believe, does that. It’s not well drawn like whistlers mother, I can’t paint. It’s not well crafted like The Love Song, but, to be fair, it took a single draft and less than twenty minutes. If open to interpretation is the standard for poetry though, and in this brief edit I’m saying it is, this flash is broader than either example I’ve given. Flashes in general are. Whistler’s mom, for instance, is limited in where she’ll go from here, or there, from that moment. Part of the beauty is that limitation; she won’t be going to the club and fucking a stranger, she isn’t going to be hit by a bus (horse, maybe, but not from her rocker, not with any immediacy implied in the art), she isn’t going to throw a whisky glass across the room. Most of that is true of Eliot’s narrator as well.

In a flash, however, the same characters could do any of that on either margin of the flash; it’s not a story, often it’s not a story. A flash could have either of those characters do any of that simply because they are so at their wits end at having their options so limited they almost have to fuck a stranger, throw a whisky glass, get hit by a bus or horse. That’s not the point though. That’d be telling a story.

I get the kind of note, often, that says the reader wants to know more, wants more of the story. Sometimes it comes with the self-conscious little bit about how that is meant to be flattering. It’s a public forum, I like notes. I like that note no matter how often or infrequently I get it. But the flattering part is that the flash was done well, not that the story was that compelling.

I can say with a fair degree of certainty that there is no more to this flash. It’s what I like about it. Any more or less and it would be something completely different. I know, that’s true of any flash, in theory, in practice, no, it isn’t. Sure, expanding a flash makes it no longer a flash just through sheer weight of words, but, you know, a story is a story, telling more or less of it isn’t really what defines it. This is not a story at all. This is a flash. All the stories that different readers thought were in this are their own the way that what I think when I look at whistlers mother is my own. The flash itself is not telling you a story. It’s not a photograph either; it’s not pretending to be objective.

If I were going to write a second draft it would be to shorten it, to remove anything at all that’s leading (e.g. that it’s a party, that the characters are different genders). I also might not mention that there was a prompt at all.

I don’t know. Right at the moment I like this flash and I like it for the reasons I’ve mentioned. If I were to read it again and read this edit I might change my mind, though I might still let it all stand. It’s important, I think, to, every now and again, say ‘I like this one’ referring to your own flash.