Tuesday Flash Focus: Say We Met Jeff Landon When We Were Wondering About Flash

Say we met, say we met in Virginia and it was snowing in the mountains, and we were standing at the top of a steep hill with a toboggan in my hands, a blue toboggan, and say we were laughing, a little high from your brother's pot, holding on to each other with mittened hands. We could huddle around a tiny bonfire with hot chocolate in one thermos and hot buttered rum in the other, and puff the night air with our words and your cigarette smoke. We would be the tallest people on the top of the hill, the grown-ups, and behind us, over an iced ridge of pine trees, a Chevron sign would glow neon red and blue, and you'd shiver and take off your stocking cap to shake out the ice from your hair. We would face each other on the blue toboggan, side by side, and listen to the way a small town feels after the first real snow in years. And let's say we're laughing and new to each other--let's forget about all the years and the quiet distance.

Our coats crinkle when we move, and right before takeoff you loop your arms around me and we're flying, flying down a hill on a blue toboggan. Stars pour down on pine trees and snow, and I can feel your smile on my neck, a crooked smile, and we slide down that hill and near the end of our ride we kiss each other hard, kiss like teenagers in someone's dark basement, with our bodies pressed together, and we look like one large person, a lumpy one, flying down a hill that is steeper than any hill we ever imagined, back then.

Before reading "Flying," I wondered if the "big ideas" I had inside me could be contained within such a condensed form. Landon's story made me realize (1) that big ideas don't drive flash narratives into existence (characters and their desires do) and (2) that lasting, powerful emotions and ideas could come out of these compressed, urgent stories. I remember wanting to write like Jeff Landon, realizing I never would quite get there, and that being okay, then realizing later it was a silly thing to want to write like, or be as good as, someone else, but that first desire to be like Jeff drove my first flash narratives into existence, to fly as Jeff did in that first Quick Fiction tale I returned to again and again.

Later in my MFA, when it came time to write my critical thesis, I wrote about "tragic urgency in the short short" and went back to "Flying" to find these thoughts:

Landon's decision to begin the story in the hypothetical world--the world that never was but might have been--imbues the piece with that sense of loss. As in Frost's "Road Not Taken," the idea of human limitation--of having to live with what is but be haunted by what might have been--provides a tragic background for the events. That possibility--of becoming one large person if only--creates the tension in the piece, the gain that's offset by the loss, that none of that happened. The image of the ride recalls tragic theoretician and critic Normand Berlin's The Secret Cause  and its insight into American tragedy, "connected with a journey of escape, of going away from...restrictions...from the evil and brutality of the world, only to meet and be wounded by it" (153). In such a world, we confront a tragic truth of our existence--"of escape leading to no escape, of freedom leading to restriction" so that the "ride itself becomes the meaning of life; to ride is to affirm oneself" (159). Landon's characters ride toward a freedom impossible ever to grasp, and that the kissed lips don't exist add to the poignant complexity of the ride. They will never be "one person." The storied ride that promised freedom instead reminds us of what will never be, of the limitations of our ability to recover what is essentially unrecoverable. The gain is offset by a loss.