In my first quarter of courses to get my MFA (a bureaucratic requirement so that I could be considered “qualified” to teach writing, even though I’ve had over 140 books published), I took a focused class on writing flash fiction. I’ve always written stories according to the length they needed to be, and never focused especially on extreme brevity, but this was an interesting exercise.
At first, I started out with extremely short, clever bits, like …
“Last Will and Testament”
The immortal man wrote his “last” will and testament, again, knowing full well it would never be his last.
Or …
“Paradox”
The time traveler contemplated whether he should go back in time to talk himself out of inventing the time machine, but somehow he couldn’t seem to come to a decision.
Those are cute, but there’s more of a challenge to writing an actual story, with characters and emotions, a point, in a thousand words or less. I began this collection with the very short “Memorial,” my first published work, which was flash fiction, though I didn’t realize it at the time. This is a new story, written for the flash fiction course, a story that gets to the heart of why every science fiction fan loves Mars. It’s in our DNA.