Exhibit X Fiction | Prose presents...

Exhibit X Fiction | Prose series kicks off the winter/spring season with a flash fiction reading by Forrest Roth, who edits Flash Fiction for Artvoice, and Kim Chinquee, a fiction writer recently hired by Buffalo State College.

Forrest Roth

Wikipedia defines “flash fiction” with the succinctness of the genre itself as “fiction of extreme brevity.” It speaks well of this newish genre—at least the name is new, as is the level of interest in it—that it can produce two quality writers with such distinct styles as Roth and Chinquee.

Forrest Roth’s “Vouchsafed” is a story in one sentence that runs a total of 88 words. It’s structure as a single sentence means that the unfolding of the sentence itself needs to do as much narrative work as, if not more than, the story itself. It could even be said that the storyteller, if one can speak of a storyteller in this instance, is not the author, but rather the sentence itself. Each phrase reveals and hides, leading the reader on to the next punctuation mark in a kind of feedback loop that never quite allows the reader in, but nonetheless pushes the eyes forward towards the conclusion. It seems to concern a contemporary Prufrock—the nerverwracked and self-conscious protagonist of T.S. Eliot’s poem—who stands in his shoes before a door, unable to decide whether to enter and risk tracking mud into the house or to turn away, instead to write his anxiety into fiction.

Vouchsafed

These habiting shoes, a book decrees, stand pat—politeness must transcend them with us—outside an open double door of many fine woods, though the toes may head toward a vestibule where dirt should not be tracked; and few refinements help elude tracking, abstain from hesitation, if stepworn stairs in longshadow obligate the apoplectic guest to fumble pointed so his senses clear away service from the alcove, to play listening games for a prize in abhorrence, the hosts’ welcome long ago returning astray, or his odd hand-written thing.

“All Her Ribbons,” by Kim Chinquee, on the other hand, clocks in at a comparatively expansive 268 words. These proceed using more traditional narrative devices—dialogue, internal monologue, and a crisis driven home through evocative imagery. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that “All Her Ribbons,” also focuses on a decision. In this case, it is a decision already made by a high school girl to quit the cross-country team. Her crisis concerns her discovery that talent is relative, i.e., you are only as good as your competition. In this case, she discovers that the competition at her old school, where she was the best runner, may not have been so great. Her economy of style does not keeper from also give us vivid flashes of her family life (sad, lonely, desperate), of the place she lives (the country) and also of the difficult internal struggle that has allowed her to make her decision. “All Her Ribbons” was originally published in Elimae.

All Her Ribbons

He said he needed her, and she wiped her face a little, stepping to the in-lane, closer to the tundra.

She’d told him she was quitting, tired of being laughed at. She was always last. She said the distance was too long, and she couldn’t even finish without stopping, couldn’t do the workouts without walking.

He wore those running shorts that rose too high, flapping up when you went faster and the wind blew. His hair made him look like Elvis, and his hands seemed big, like he should have been a wrestler.

He said she was getting better. He said, Do you want to be a quitter?

Everyone was gone now and she told him she felt foolish. She’d won all of the dashes at her last school, collecting all her ribbons, and she’d thought she’d earn some more here. It was just running. It wasn’t hard.

You’re not always last, he said. She beat someone in the last meet. He said, That was really something.

He said, “Someone has to be last.”

He said, “You don’t always have to win.”

He said, “You really want to be a quitter?”

She figured no one really cared and it was her decision. At home, her father ran around with knives falling from his pockets, and her mother couldn’t live without Chianti. At mealtimes, she sat on her hands, looking out at the gate that kept in all the cattle.

The coach said, “And who cares if someone’s laughing? That’s a silly reason to quit.”

She watched him fly away then. He wentfast. He tripped on a hurdle.

Roth and Chinquee read at Hallwalls Cinema on Wednesday, Feburary 4 at 8pm.