Miniatures by Susan Midalia

Night Parrot Press, $24.99 pb, 175 pp

What is a short short story? More specifically, how short is it (or how long)? The most famous tiny example is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Whether he wrote this or not, it represents the gold standard in suggesting much in little. Like poetry, microstories or flash fictions allow no formal wobbling as authors tread a perilous tightrope between banality and inspired ingenuity.

The other risk of the very short story is its ephemeral nature; those weak on narrative can be merely a wisp of smoke in a breeze. In Miniatures: A collection of short stories (Night Parrot Press, $24.99 pb, 175 pp), Susan Midalia’s very short shorts (well over one hundred of them) prove that it’s possible to offer a story – that is, something with a narrative, with progression – within a few words. Some of these stories are a page, some a paragraph, while one is only a sentence. Witty, endearing, subversive, inventive, delightful – there are many apt adjectives for these beautifully polished gems.

In other hands, the risk does not always pay off. For example, some of the microstories in Julia Prendergast’s Bloodrust (Spineless Wonders, $24.99 pb, 160 pp) rely entirely on voice or mood rather than narrative and they seem somewhat provisional, still in draft. That said, they also flow like poetry: the final story, ‘Riddled Gestures’, is more poem than prose. Midalia’s pieces are undeniably stories and her style is realism, but Midalia’s scenarios are not necessarily realistic ones, and the fine control she maintains draws us into their surreal and surprising premises, even in that one-sentence story.