Lydia Davis is the most important short American story writer I have come across after Raymond Carver. I love her stories’. Here are three samples of her flash fiction, some of her very short short stories in her collected stories. I pray one day she wins the Nobel.

A Different Man

“At night he was a different man. If she knew him as he was in the morning, at night she hardly recognized him: a pale man, a gray man, a man in a brown sweater, a man with dark eyes who kept his distance from her, who took offence, who was not reasonable. In the morning, he was a rosy king, gleaming, smooth-cheeked and smooth-chinned, fragrant with perfumed talc, coming out into the sunlight with a wide embrace in his royal red plaid robe…”

(Loved the way she concludes with a valediction of time passing, of a dwindling into cramped old age (night is used as metaphor for old age and morning for his youth), but then in an act of ironically sentimental romantic retrospection, she delivers a final flurry—with the ever-present participles “gleaming” and “coming out into the sunlight” animating and glamorizing a last sentence that ends not with a period but with an ellipsis springing hope eternal.)

The Outing

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
(I like “The Outing” because it’s the skeleton of a story, poking fun at the notion of “what happens”—and yet still creates a powerful sense of what indeed happened.)

Fear

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families too, to quiet us.
(This one portrays anxiety, the kind of irrational fear that rises right to the surface, breaking through the comforting repetition of certain phrases and words. In the last sentence of the story the narrator says that each of the neighbors have thought about running out their homes and screaming just as the woman does, but they never do because they have friends and family that keep them under control. .This one gives a deep drink of what can and cannot be known, of the relative success and failure of sympathy with other people, of need that enables comfort and comfort that disguises need.)

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