Hot Spots and Story Events in Flash Fiction
Using "Tenderoni" by Kathy Fish
SmokeLong Quarterly is celebrating their 20th year by featuring blasts from the past. My tribute to this story is too long for their guidelines, so I’m sharing it here!
Kathy Fish has always been a master of the flash form, especially in creating the “Hot Spot” in her character’s lives. These are the scenes that will reveal that character’s life in a way that no other moment would. Unlike the short story or the novel, the flash fiction writer does not have a full canvas but rather a spot in the corner. “Tenderoni” is a perfect example of the single-scene flash, a story that reveals everything we need to know about these characters and their current and future fates.
One of the reasons I love this story is because of the clear story event that is created from the opening, how their plans are interrupted, how they are physically and psychically stopped by the dead cat on the side of the road. In a longer short story, this would be a mere beat among many to create plot, but here, the whole story is contained in this revealing moment.
My boyfriend and I grab our bikes and pedal across town for a parade which has probably been canceled anyway. Ahead, Mark's skinny calves pump, his day glo rain poncho flaps behind him like a flag. He stops and gets off the bike and I catch up to him.
“Oh, damn,” I say. “A kitty.”
I love how much is unsaid here, how the reader can make so many inferences from the opening sentence. We quickly know the point of view, characters, the weather, and their hopeful destination. Age is conveyed using bikes, so we know there’s a possibility of a lack of sophistication. This possible naivete is increased by the mention of the event of the parade that they’re ignorant enough to hope for even though it’s raining hard enough for the use of ponchos. We know parts of these characters. We’ve been these characters.
In the second sentence, Fish keeps us moving, keeps the scene active, by moving from the summary of the first sentence to the actual pumping of bike pedals, zooming in on the boyfriend’s calves. This move is so deft as it characterizes the narrator/main character’s feelings (love/lust) and gives us a visual of him. Nothing is static here. Nothing is mired in exposition. Many writers, especially in rough drafts, would spend too much time explaining the characters’ journey or explaining their relationship. Fish does all of this in concrete, specific details that help us move with the characters across the page.
And I love how Fish utilizes dialogue to put us more on the stage of this story with these characters. Dialogue is a powerful tool for any writer, but especially in flash pieces because you only get so many words! So the dialogue has to be dynamic, interesting, and doing the work of revealing character, moving the story forward, and creating action that we care about! So Fish allows her narrator to speak first because it establishes who we should be rooting for, who’s important in this story!
And Fish is so good at eschewing exposition whenever possible. Many writers want to add bits about feelings, thoughts, and maybe some details evoking the setting before lines of dialogue, but there’s no exposition to lead in here, no mention of huffing or puffing. Everything is focused on the images that help the reader visualize the scene. These characters are now stopped on their journey, and “The Event” of the story can now take place.
“It looks sort of lumpy,” he says. There’s a drop of rain holding on to the tip of his nose and steam rising from his shoulders. “We should move it.”
Here is another lesson about how to use point of view and filtering through the narrator/main character to keep that unity of form where every detail comes from the perspective of the main character. Such a deft move to put that line of exposition/visual detail between the boyfriend’s two lines of dialogue. He may be talking, but the narrator is in complete control of the details.
Writers who struggle with writing with so few words often struggle with writing specific and unique dialogue. They’re not used to each word carrying so much weight, so they often start with dialogue that any character might say. They start with the pleasantries of a normal realistic conversation, but flash dialogue often has to cut out those steps/those lines and get to the point. Brevity demands compression and puts pressure on characters to get to the heart of the matter, to say the things they’ve either never said before or have always wanted to say.
Fish never messes around with banalities, she understands intuitively how small the real estate of a flash story is, how important each word is, and that dialogue carries the most weight, because it not only has to reveal characterization but must also contribute to the conflict or tension. It’s responsible for creating the effect of velocity on the page.
“These ponchos are worthless.”
“Stop goading me,” he says.
We’re sure these characters have argued before, but none of their arguments are as important as this one. Everything will be revealed, because the boyfriend stopped to help something that is helpless. It’s a futile gesture, and our narrator is at first enamored, but as things get worse, she’s willing to give him credit for trying, that he’s not capable in this moment, but she’s willing to absolve him of his failure. The gesture is enough.
“Baby, it seems like there are people whose whole job it is to remove dead animals, like we have here. I feel crummy. And I have to pee. I want to take a bath and go back to bed and sleep for a hundred hours.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “This is awful, isn’t it?”
The wind stirs up and blows my hood back. The rain comes harder, in waves.
“Only if I’m not still your baby.” I swallow rain and move closer. “Only if I’m not still your tenderoni.”
But this absolution comes with a condition, one she’s sure he’ll pass. She wants to be just as in love as they were before they stopped for the cat. And the story's genius is that this isn’t stated anywhere. Fish trusts her reader to understand this. That the narrator is done with being wet, and as long as they are the same as they were before, then this is just a blip in their lives, their relationship. But how the boyfriend responds is why I love this story and why this is a story and not just a vignette.
“Oh,” he says. He pats my head and he’s never patted my head before. He stoops and picks up the kitten’s smooshed head and its body and the pieces are so small in his hands. Together, we walk to the side of the road and I watch as he chucks them, hard, into a patch of high weeds.
Look how abstract that line of dialogue is, how he has a chance to reassure her, to say something sweet, to mark with his words an affirmation of their relationship, but instead, he pats her head, treats her like a pet, and how can we not see the connection between the unfortunately dead pet and his now treatment of her, how he creates this metaphor through his final actions of picking it up, of losing his tenderness, of throwing it to the side.
In flash fiction, it’s not just important to create these “hot spots” in your character’s lives but to utilize craft moves of intense point-of-view filtering and dynamic dialogue to create conflict and tension, to bring us to a place of understanding, of allowing us just enough context to understand the fate of their relationship.
Prompt:
Start a story with a character or character going to an event that may or may not be canceled. Or maybe they're not supposed to be there because they're too young or too old. Think about those times you got on your bike or your car and left for an event that you're mostly sure won't happen, but you've got this hope that it will. Knowing and still hoping does a great job of creating tension in any story. Consider what might stop your characters along the way? How does it reveal them to themselves or at least one character to the other? Consider making this stop in the journey the “Event” of the story as it is in “Tenderoni.”
Recent Flash Reads:
The Only Light by Cathy Ulrich
The King’s Tower by Cheryl Pappas
Chocolate Cake by Jennifer Wortman
Breaker Boys by Avitus B. Carle
My Mother Visits Me in America and is Offended by What the Dishwasher Can Do by Tara Isabel Zambrano
Try At Home:
How can you create a character in only 100 words? Focus on a narrator trying to understand another character’s choices or actions! How can you create a myth from this character? How can you mix the realistic and the magical? How does this character’s myth or mythical actions affect your narrator? How does the narrator shift from talking to us in this story? What have they lost or gained?
Excellent instructive analysis. Tommy Dean.