Stories to challenge the idea of what makes a story

Flash fiction, according to Reedsy, "isn’t just a pared-down short story. Its focus isn’t necessarily on plot or characters, though it should still have both. Instead, the emphasis is placed on movement: each sentence must peel back a new layer that wasn’t visible at first. If a line (or even a word) doesn't progress the story or reveal more about a character, it probably won't belong in this medium."

A prose poem, according to the Poetry Foundation, is "prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry."

I'm starting with these two definitions in an effort to place many of the 22 stories in Christian Fennell's debut book, Torrents of Our Time. His website says that he writes literary fiction, essays, book reviews, and offers manuscript editing services to a select few clients. He was a columnist and the fiction editor of The Prague Review (which no longer has a website), and he has worked "as a screenwriter, commercial director, and as a producer and executive producer of extreme sports."

The stories are all short, some no more than a page and a half, which is sent me to the flash fiction definition. They are pared down to almost nothing, requiring the reader to fill in place, time, motivation, and more. Because Fennell offers so little, it is difficult to care about the people in the stories or what they do. 

The second story is titled "Introduction: Why I Write Fiction" and begins "How do we use this space—this time, you and I, best. What do we have to say? Because that's what it is, isn't it? Like a train on a track in a needle—running. Time. Understanding. This place and love. We all have this and we all want this." I do not understand "a train on a track in a needle," Nor do I understand what "this" is, and the second paragraph does not help me: "For the longest I couldn't write directly about mental health. I still can't, not really, not comfortably, and most certainly, not particularly well. Not as someone who suffers from it [mental health?], but as someone who lived and loved next to it."

Which is why I wonder if some of these pieces are really prose poems; they're not supposed to be read as short stories. They are incidents, anecdotes: Two brothers, drinking beer, sitting on "blocks of dried cracked white oak" decide a way to quit smoking is to have your mouth sewn shut. (Apparently it doesn't work.) A guy is traveling with too much cash and connects with a Russian girl. A girl meets a guy who is about to kidnap a cash machine. A guy builds a ship 43-feet bow to stern, 13-feet wide, 10-feet high in the middle of the Canadian prairie; it doesn't go anywhere.

Much of the dialogue is drastically pared down. Here in "On My Way to Sunday" are two women in a coffee shop (Fennell does not usually use quotation marks.)

Rebecca sipped her coffee. We've seen each other here now for how long?
I'm not sure?
Six or seven months? Perhaps longer?
Yes, at least that.
Why shouldn't we get to know one another? What is this world otherwise? Although, it is true, one must be careful. But only to a degree.
Yes, true.
You don't know who I am, do you?
You? No.
Jelinek.
That Jelinek?
Yes.
Oh.
And what is it you do?
Real estate.
That can be rewarding . . . .

According to the publishing acknowledgements in the back of the book, a slightly different version of that story was published in the HCE Review, a University College of Dublin literary magazine. In all, 15 of the 22 stories that appear in Torrents of Our Time have been published in international literary magazines.

While these are not to my taste, they are each interesting in its own way. Readers who are looking for something different—the literary magazine editors who first published the stories—will find it in Fennell's collection.