Creating Scenes with Strangers
Primary Relationships in Flash Fiction
One way to learn about the primary relationship in a flash story is to introduce a stranger, a knock at the door. This stranger will put pressure on the relationship or pressure on the story to reveal what the relationship was before, where it's at now, and where it might go in the future. Unlike longer narratives which often provide the main character with lots of time alone to process feelings and choices, Flash often needs a primary relationship in order to show the characters acting on the stage of the story.
The primary relationship is the catalyst for the chance at change or reckoning for the main character. Characters don't often change or face a reckoning by themselves. Because of its small word count, Flash doesn't allow our main characters to remain in stasis for long, and being alone in the world of their thoughts can be too static for this form. The moment of the story gains more immediacy, more context, and more importance when it's not allowed to linger for too long in the head of the character, when the reader is asked to do the thinking for the character in their own minds, to fill in the unsaid, based on inferences created through the small brushstrokes of action, context, exposition, and deliberation parsed out by the writer.
Craft elements and moves made in miniature make the flash form different than that of longer narratives. Exposition is warranted and enjoyed in longer works because of how it stretches the canvas and the way the reader gets to sink into the larger world of the main character. In contrast, Flash provides a challenge, a puzzle, a conditional knowledge, like watching a stranger on a busy subway or street. Both forms have their inherent enjoyment, but they also have their own purposes in storytelling.
“Thin Mints" by Francine Witte delves into this unique primary relationship that is cracked open by the arrival of a girl scout selling cookies door to door. Witte is a master of creating realistic and resonant relationships in minimal world counts. In less than 500 words, we are privy to a daughter-father relationship that crackles with the unsaid, that is electric with specific and unique details that reveal these characters and their particular relationship.
Girl Scout at the door, a box of Thin Mints in her hand. She is maybe 12 or so. Bangs and peachy lip gloss. The purse against her hip is like the one my mother wore. Cobra skin and golden clasp.
I love how Witte hides this first-person narrator, how what she sees, and how she conveys how interruptive this knock at the door is for this character. There's an intimacy here, a preview of the initial outside conflict and the emotional conflict under the surface. A story that works on both the vertical and horizontal in its opening. That purse is a question generator, and Flash often needs these kinds of expositional lines to build tension and intrigue. Just a brushstroke, and we're wondering why this girl has the purse and not our narrator? Why would this narrator open the door, and where will this conversation take us? The specific, concrete details also usher in this narrator's authority and authenticity. We're reading to follow this narrator anywhere! All in four sentences!
My mother died eraser-like. One day there, then gone. After the funeral, my father built a mountain out of my mother's things, her purses and shoes. The mountain was shaped like my mother, and slept next to him at night.
Yes, the typical context/exposition second paragraph, but the writing here again is so specific. It introduces more conflict and the second character in the primary relationship between daughter and father! Ah, here's the real story, we think! Here’s a father that is struggling with grief, and we're not told this but shown this by the unique mountain of the wife's things. And now, the purse in the opening is even more critical to this story! We now have a deeper context for what is happening in this narrator's life, a knowledge we need to move forward into the rest of the story!
“We owe you, right? Samoas, right?” I dig into my pocket. “Your father already paid me,” the Girl Scout says. She points to the purse, “he also gave me this.”
So not a stranger per se, but from this dialogue and action by the narrator, we see that the narrator is now in charge of adult things such as paying for the cookies. The father, we start to see, is lost to that bed and the mountain of his wife's things. I love how Witte answers the question about the purse by giving this girl scout the chance to brag, to show that she has some meaning to the father as well. And then adds a new question for us, what will happen now? How will our narrator react to this news?
One night, after my mother died, I knocked and knocked at my father’s door. Something about a leaky pipe. When he didn’t answer, I creaked open the door. My father on the bed in a whiskey-sleep, his open hand on the purse.
I love the pause in the front/horizontal story to provide more context for the relationship between the narrator and father. This is the important relationship, even if it's not in the front story yet! I also love how Witte creates a structure or map for us to read this story. We know that the narrator has more to say about how her life has changed since her mother's death, how it's shaped her relationship with her father. We'll now look forward to more of these interruptions to learn more. There's a tension in having to wait for more context, for more to go unsaid, for each section to be compressed.
“Your father home?” the Girl Scout asks, holding out the box of Thin Mints.
“ I brought him these.”
*****
It’s a good thing I didn’t want the purse myself. Wouldn’t take it if you paid me.
One way to move from exposition or backfill into the front story is to create an escalation. There's no reason for this twelve-year-old to interact with the father when the narrator can take the cookies, but this stranger wants more than just delivering the cookies, and the narrator is observant enough to know that the purse is the reason for the girl scout's visit. The narrator assures us she wouldn't want the purse, and maybe we believe her, but we know something deeper is happening here, and this girl at the door is an interloper! The girl scout's desires are now more known while our main character’s are still hidden.
When I was little, I thought the purse was magic. I had cut my finger, and my mother said hush and pulled a blue band-aid from the purse's belly. The scent of cherry cough drops and lilac blending as she patched my tiny cut. When my mother died, I shook and shook the purse. Emptied it upside down. Nothing but lint balls and loose change. Not a scrap of magic.
I love the swerve Witte creates here by continuing with the backfill instead of going back to the front story. The question from the girl scout hangs while we pause for a mini-scene of the narrator searching her mother's purse for a kind of magic healing. We're meant to understand that the purse isn't important to her, but we know this is misleading to herself and us. The purse has meaning by being the primary object in contention; its imagery, repeated but denied by the main character, adds tension and unreliability to the narrator, separating us just a few inches so we can make our own inferences and judgments! This is a subtle but powerful move through the point of view to keep this story interesting and to keep us wondering what will happen next!
My father is standing behind me now. “You said you’d like to try these,” the Girl Scout says, offering my father the Thin Mints. “Oh, thank you,” he says, ripping open the box. “This is good,” he says. He holds up his hand, “wait here.”
Yes, finally, the father enters the scene! He's acting on the stage, and we get to see how this relationship between the main character and father is working and how this stranger pressures all of the characters to act to reveal the power dynamic in the scene and in these relationships! Other stories might have focused on the verbal sparing of the two young characters, how the narrator might have said something stunning and then slammed the door, but this story isn't about this power dynamic and this relationship, but rather the relationship the main character has with her father that can only be illuminated by this stranger at the door! In your own Flash, consider if you're illuminating the wrong relationship? If you're focused on the conventional relationships and power dynamics, if your story isn't searching for a way to illuminate characters and their relationships?
There's nothing deviant about this exchange, but something is simmering here that's oft-putting because we're rooting for our main character, and like her (though this is unsaid), we're worried she might be replaced. So here's a father who can't function/get with it for his daughter but can meet the girl scout at the door, praise her choice of cookie and then ask her to wait for something else, more? And None of this is said! It's all inferred by the reader! Witte allows us to deeply inhabit this story, this moment in this main character's life, and she doesn't overdo it by telling abstractly how the main character feels!
“You’d think we’d sell more Samoas,” the Girl Scout is saying. “Everyone says they like coconut, but I think they mean in their hand lotion.” I tell her we like the Samoas. “Well, really, it was my mother,” I say.
We do get that snotty comment from our narrator, her attempt to take back some of the power, to remind the girl that there's another character in this situation, missing but looming over everything for our main character. Again, Witte has the opportunity to close off this moment, to leave us slightly satisfied with our main character's choice to act and stand up for her mother and herself. However, that ending might have been too hollow, and we've still got this father, and his choice will determine the possible change or reckoning for this main character! Closing the door might have shifted her relationship with the girl scout, but remember, the girl scout is more important as a catalyst for revealing the relationship between the daughter and the father. Luckily, Witte gives us this opportunity in the last two sections of the story.
My father comes back with a pair of my mother’s shoes. Taken right out of the mountain. “I’m trying to clear out a few things,” he says, offering the shoes to the Girl Scout. “Maybe for your mama.” She takes the purse off of her shoulder. “Thanks,” she says, “my mom doesn’t wear heels, and also she says I have to give this back. Too expensive.”
I love that the father comes back with the shoes; how this feels like an escalation. It's begging for the daughter to respond, but Witte flips our expectations by having the girl scout refuse the shoes and give back the purse. The girl scout wanted no part of this power dynamic, this relationship with the main character and the father. Because we were so close to the narrator, we didn't/couldn't see this coming, the same as the narrator, which only bonds us more. We've wrongly judged this character, which catapults us back into the relationship between the narrator and the father. Is she missing something about her father, too?
Later that night, much later, I creak open the door to my father’s room. The mountain is gone, but everything is scattered all across the floor. Almost like someone took the room and shook it and shook it. My father, alone now, on the bed, staring upwards, as if hoping something might fall from the sky.
Witte has to know that we're aching for a confrontation with the daughter and father. Something that shines their relationship in a new light, a chance for the main character to act, but instead, we're met with white space. A refusal to reveal what was said. Did they silently go their separate ways in the house? Was there a fight? Did the narrator reveal her true feelings? We don't know! And yes, this frustrates some Flash readers, who want the "full story." Flash has the opportunity to cut out some steps in the traditional plot diagram, and here we almost lose the climax, and we surely don't get any falling action but are thrust towards an ending put solely in the hands of the narrator, with her having the choice what to tell us.
And she skips the fight and waits until the opportunity for a confrontation has diminished to an unlikely chance. The mountain is gone, and we pause here, happy for just a millisecond before we find out that the stuff is still there but thrown to the floor. Metaphorically the things have lost their value to the father, that something has metaphorically shaken him, that he's still waiting for this shaking to give him a reason to get up, to interact with his daughter, but he can't, not yet. He has shifted, but in a small, physical way, and he's still waiting for that emotional shift, and so is our narrator. Her reckoning, unfortunately, is in the hands of this father, who isn't there emotionally yet. I love how Witte conveys all of this through metaphor, how she makes me work out some of the needing and resonance by myself from the clues of the story. I leave this story feeling like I know these characters, that something of their essence has been revealed to me, and though I don't know everything about them, I appreciate their journey and my journey by reading their story.
Prompt: Think of a primary relationship you want to examine, but start with a stranger coming to the door or another setting, and allow the stranger to be the catalyst for revealing the primary relationship! Consider how a special object could be used to add to the pressure put on the relationship by the stranger. How is this object important to all three characters? Who ends up with the object? How are the power dynamics shown in the primary relationship? Are they the same dynamics at the end of the story? What does the main character know about themselves or the other person in the primary relationship by the end of the story?
Monthly Flash reading:
When You’re Bonnie and He’s Clyde by Candace Hartsuyker
Pumpkin by Gillian O’Shaughnessy
Girls Howling by Christine H. Chen
Fire in the Teak Fields by Kristina T. Saccone
A Way by Sarah Freligh
Try At Home: Return to a draft that isn’t quite working. Ask yourself if you’ve closed off the story too soon? Ask yourself about the power dynamics and if they have shifted? Did you allow your main character to come to the ending without showing some form of vulnerability? Do you need a metaphor at the end to add depth and resonance?
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4/15 Building Fictional Relationships through Dialogue, Ritual, and Objects ONLINE
Generous lesson upon exemplary story. Thank you so much.