The Short Short Story

It never fails. As soon as I enter a lecture hall my mind reaches a transitory state - one in which I have never-ending streams of creative visions battling inside my cranium for attention. Of course none of the evident synapse firing is willing to pause, even momentarily, on the discussion topic I need to be taking notes on for my final exams. Today I began to think about the short short story and the brevity of a good anecdote. I was reminded of a contest I once came across in a literary publication on the Brooklyn College campus. The Ten Word Story.

It struck me as strange at first, maybe even bordering on pointless, to try to convey an idea worth conveyance by using such a limited amount of words. I thought: I've strung together longer lines of expletives after banging my toe and that wouldn't even skim the surface of the bad day I might have been coping with. On the other hand, one must consider the archetype - the ideal form as Plato might say - and whether this might not be the best way to handle the telling of a story in which 99 parts out of 100 have already been told to death.

Well thinking lead to researching and I found some short shorts that were so comfortably under ten words, so terse that one can very comfortably use the term epigrammatic, and yet so richly embroidering an archetypal story that is already firmly rooted in our collective consciousness. Anyway, It doesn't escape me that in discussing the benefits of single-digit word counts I have managed to compile the opening bit of an essay - rather antithetical to my point. So first I will display two Short Shorts from two of my favorite authors that I feel capture the essence of these bonsai trees of the literary forest.
"For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn." - Ernest Hemingway
"Longed for him. Got him. Shit." - Margaret Atwood


And because I couldn't help but dive in head first a little myself, a few of my own attempts:

Timid
He wants to kiss you. Scared you will turn away.
Divorce
Made in China. Shattered now. One less thing divided, ruined.
Wine
Red. White. Red again. His keys clumsy in the ignition.
Retrospect
Mother warned I'd catch pneumonia. How wrong she was, cancer.
Necessity
Why do in ten what you can accomplish in - crap.
Every
Let us eat. If for no other reason than ________.

And finally let me encourage everyone to post some of their own. I'd love to hear some fun and creative ones.