Happy Sunday Morning. I’m getting very close to starting a new book, fiction this time, so my original posts are going to be coming a bit slower. But I was thinking this week about very short pieces. There was some kind of kerfluffle on Twitter, which I won’t go into, but the subject of flash/short pieces came up again, so I was thinking about good short pieces. What makes them work. What makes them not work. Here are a couple of mine I think work well, and links to a few essays I mentioned a week or so ago in my Substack on literary journals.
Spinning
We were sitting on the front porch drinking wine when the couple came sneaking down the street. They were a young couple, mid-20s maybe, and they were both looking around and laughing a little, at each other, and at, I would later realize, what they were doing.
Our neighbors across the street were moving, and they had set some of their stuff on the curb for people to pick through. I’m in Kansas now, and I would say this is a Midwestern sensibility except I’ve seen it everywhere: the hope someone will take what we can no longer keep, the recycling of household items we can’t bring ourselves to throw away. I had recently moved, and given away most of my things, or left them on the curb for someone else to have: my daughters’ way-too-small-now bicycles, a bonsai tree I had trained for 10 years, a guitar I had outgrown. Bookshelves that had once housed my own work, the desk at which I had written more words than I know what do with, the couch where my ex-wife and I watched movies until we were too tired to go to bed. The bunk beds we bought for our tiny daughters when we moved into that house, the books and games we’d collected over the years, the houseplants and clothes hangers, the mementos and memories. I never thought my marriage would end, and giving away everything seemed like giving away the last 20 years, so I wanted, in the way we all want to have a use in the world, for someone else to find value in what I had once owned.
The young couple, it seemed, had spied a set of hula-hoops there on the curb, and were coming back—as night set in, as the lights in the houses were flickering on, as the wine started to do its work and the world seemed fine—to get them. I don’t know if they wanted them for their children or to remind themselves they had once been children, but the man waded through the containers of kitchenware and boxes of paperback books, and grabbed the hoops.
Beside me, J. took my hand. At the time I had only lived with her a few months. We’re middle-aged now, and sit on the porch some nights drinking wine and watching the world move through the windows of our eyes, but I first met her in third grade. We graduated high school, then lost each other for 25 years, but had come together again after both our lives had fallen apart. She lost her husband, and I had divorced, and somehow we ended up together watching a couple much younger than we were taking hula-hoops from a house where people were moving, headed on to the next part of their lives.
The hula-hoop couple was still laughing, and this was a fine summer evening in Middle America, so I called out “Let’s see it,” and the couple, realizing what I wanted, started hula-hooping right there on the sidewalk. The man made two rotations. The woman made maybe four. Neither of them knew what they were doing, the same as all of us, all of the time, but we clapped and cheered and the man made a thumbs up and the woman bowed, and they went on into the coming night.
As they went, I imagined them passing the hula-hoops down to their children. Or maybe they only wanted to be reminded what it was like to be children again, to find joy in spinning, in seeing themselves back at the same spot after rotating so long they weren’t sure where they would end up. A small celebration that life is a circle. What we give away, we keep.
The Loneliest Whale in the World
There’s a whale swimming through the cold waters of the north Pacific who doesn’t belong to any pod. He has no family or friends because he sings at such a high frequency no other whales can hear him. This is a baleen whale—a blue or humpback or maybe a hybrid of both—so he has four heartchambers as big as our whole bodies, but no one to warm even one of them. If he’s a blue whale he’s the most massive mammal on earth, and think about that for a moment, how small he must feel when no one ever answers his call.
Every year from August to December recording devices in the Pacific pick up his song. He travels as far north as the Aleutian Islands and as far south as the California coast. Since his migration patterns don’t follow those of any other baleen whale, scientists have concluded he’s never come in contact with any other of his species, and here I must take a moment to think about these scientists in an observatory listening late at night, searching the soundwaves to see where he might be in all that vast, empty ocean.
Imagine, then, listening to the repeating ping of sonar or the white static of the speakers day after day, hoping for a brief moment of song. Imagine always waiting for a reply in an endless sea of silence, a call going out but none ever answering back. How often have we hoped for the phone to ring, for the closeness of a voice over vast distances? How many connections have we missed in a lifetime? We wake in water, suspended in the serous fluid of the amniotic sac, and these same scientists say we can hear our own mothers and fathers through the thin skin, which makes me wonder how they feel when, just for a moment, they hear the whale’s song at the right soundwave and know he’s still searching for someone who will sing back.
This story reminds me of an endless black ocean, all of us trying to stay afloat. And I’ve done enough writing and raising my voice to know there should be some moral here, which means I should say something about the misfits among us, the square pegs in round holes, or only the loneliness we often feel we are drowning in. But there’s no moral: I just wanted you to hear, and be sad alongside me for a moment.1
A very short reading list of very short essays that have taught me something over the years:
Jenny Boully’s "I Remain Very Sorry For What I Did to the Little Black Kitten" an essay that hits so hard and sudden I still have trouble reading it.
Steven Church’s "Lag Time" and Jill Talbot’s "The Professor of Longing" and Amy Butcher’s "Women These Days" are essays that still move me to tears, or longing, or some undefined emotion essays bring about in me.
For flash fiction be sure to check out my friends
and and their Substack pages.Keep writing.
(Note: If you didn’t catch it, this essay is also about being a writer and hoping people read your work.)
Excellent links, Paul. Thanks. And thanks for the kind mention!
Beautiful.