Kathy Fish's "Cure" (published online by Necessary Fiction) is written in seven paragraph-long sections, and is an excellent example of how Fish is able to compress a narrative using loaded language, vivid details, and truly suggestive white space to build a compelling and tragic character within the constraints of the flash fiction form.

Here's the story's attention-grabbing first section:

The girl pretends she’s already in New York. The thought gives her a shimmery, golden feeling behind her collarbone. Lately, everything and everyone injures her. She’s become lugubrious and she’s only twenty-two. She has gained the approval of the landlady who takes note of her freshly pressed uniform. It is the way I am, too, says the landlady. As if that’s reason enough. The landlady, at least, will be sorry to see her go.

There's so much compacted into these first few sentences, including the fact that the girl is planning on moving to New York, and that there is something wrong with her, because "everything and everyone injures her." She's perhaps unreasonably gloomy or mournful--I had to look up "lugubrious," and while I'd normally balk at such a eye-catching word, I think in this case it's exactly the right choice (more on this later). We're also told that she has the admiration of her landlady, which is, at best, a backhanded compliment, as if her "freshly pressed uniform" is her only remarkable quality. And then there's the vivid language Fish uses, the finely controlled voice, the unforgettably magical "shimmery, golden feeling" the protagonist senses behind her collarbone.

The next section reveals several more important details, encapsulated in a scene only a couple of sentences long. We find out she's a waitress, and has been receiving complaints lately--one customer "writes Poor Service, Very Disappointing on the back of his receipt"--because she is too tired to work effectively. We also find out that she's mute, but not deaf mute, as everyone seems to believe she is, just because she has to communicate with sign language.

Each section reveals a little more about the protagonist without ever fully illuminating any one aspect of her life. We find out she has a boyfriend, unmentioned until the third section, when we are told that "the boyfriend handles rattlesnakes," that "it’s his religion to handle rattlesnakes. Or maybe there’s more to it than that." The boyfriend's church is located in a strip mall, and is "only a church by reason of being a gathering place of the faithful and not by reason of being a structure like a church at all." This detail seems particularly telling as the story goes on, and as her reasons for wanting to move to New York become clearer:

The landlady hauls up an old typewriter and looms over the girl’s shoulder as she works on her resume. Instead of Cedar Falls, her place of birth, the girl types Cheddar Falls, but she doesn’t notice. What she does notice is the way the floor rises, then falls under her feet when she gets up to make tea, as if she were walking on an under-inflated balloon.

She starts falling down – at work, on the street, in the shower – and wonders, what now?

She's sick with some sort of unrevealed illness, something bad enough to leave her constantly tired and to begin robbing her of some of her motor functions, her strength. She has decided to move to New York, now, while she still can. The exact reasons why are not made explicit in the story, leaving me to substitute perhaps too-obvious reasons. Perhaps she is going there to escape this place where people know her and might mourn her or pity her, or else she is going there because when this is over, she will be inevitably be apart from the people she has known in one way or another. Rather than being slowly separated from others--first by her muteness, her inability to properly express herself to those around her ("not everyone understands sign language," she notes) and then by her illness (a tumor perhaps, since she feels "as if there are little men inside her head, wielding hammers)--she has chosen to leave all at once, to make a clean break from the short life she has known.

And this, of course, brings us back to that fancy "lugubrious" from the first paragraph, a word which Webster's defines as "mournful, especially exaggerated or affected mournfulness." The story tells us that "she’s become lugubrious and she’s only twenty-two," and at that early point it's easy to assume that what she feels is simply angst, the usual feelings of being lost at that age. But of course she's not just feeling sorry for herself, because what's she's mourning is more than likely the loss of her own young life. Eventually, the boyfriend's church attempts a faith healing, dancing and chanting "with the snakes on their shoulders," but nothing helps, nothing except the promise of New York, her final destination. The protagonist finally moves away from the boyfriend and his church that is not "a structure like a church at all," only a "gathering of the faithful," and there is some sense that New York is becoming such a place for her, at least in her mind. The story tells us that she does not believe in God, but she does believe in New York, and so it is there that she has determined she will reach before she dies, one way or another, even "on a gurney if she has to."

In my mind, Kathy Fish is one of the preeminent practitioners of the flash fiction form, and one of writers whose own flash inspired me to start writing my own and then challenged me to do better, to never settle when there's so much more that could be done. While I'm still not nearly as adept at the form as Fish, her work continues to inspire me in new and exciting ways every time I encounter it, and I'm incredibly grateful for everything I've learned from her writing. Her excellent chapbook Laughter, Applause, Laughter, Music, Applause is included in the collection A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness from Rose Metal Press, which also includes chapbooks from Elizabeth Ellen, Claudia Smith, and Amy L. Clark.