Microfiction is, as the term would indicate, extremely brief. Stories can clock in at less than 100 words. It’s a form that I usually like, two of my favorite collections being AM/PM by Amelia Gray (Featherproof Books) and The Middle Stories by Sheila Heti (McSweeney’s Books), although some of Heti’s stories go for two or three brief pages so they might be categorized as “short shorts.” And one doesn’t have to look further than Baltimore for two master practitioners of microfiction: Joseph Young, author of Easter Rabbit, and Megan McShea, who has a book coming soon on Publishing Genius Press.

Young had this to say about a not-so-easily defined genre, in FRiGG, a poetry and fiction magazine:

Short stories are about texture. They fill the eye with scene and place and characterization. Microfiction is about emptiness. It’s about the spaces between words . . . the emptiness between emotion and response . . . that creates the tension in microfiction. It remains a mystery, echoing emptily, and hugely.

The 51 “stories” in Diane Williams’ Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty fall clearly into the category. But the lack of mystery and almost Zippy the Pinhead-like listing of gratuitous information make Vicky Swanky feel like a self-conscious attempt at alien life-form reportage. One entry reads: “I didn’t like my fly brooch at first either. It’s fake. You can’t get it wet. It’s very rare and the colors are not nice and I get lots of enjoyment from that.”

While reading the book, or, to be more precise, reading a few pages, getting near flummoxication, putting it back down, picking up something wherein words will meet you at least halfway—say, some challenging, avant-garde L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry—then diving back into Vicky with renewed curiosity, I kept thinking of an old college dormmate’s simple aphorism: “Ya gotta care.”

This dormmate was raised a Christian Scientist and always looked severely milk-infused and sweater-vest armored. He was also a brilliant architect, a lover of avant-garde music, and one of the biggest weedheads I knew in a dorm packed with voracious weedheads. The rest of our circle was at our young peak of cluelessness, but believed we were almost at the doorstep of the Divine, so we often chuckled at our friend’s homespun truisms. But when I found myself mired in an ill-advised relationship formed during last call or in way over my head in Latin class, my friend’s adages would come to mind.

In this case, as a reader, ya gotta care enough about some aspect of a book to remain interested and engaged, and to be compelled by some form of tension, whether it’s a plot dilemma, the freshness or honed craft of a narrative, or the dynamic of the language itself. Unfortunately, Williams’ book of terse microfiction is about uninspired and uninspiring people in stasis. The writing feels flattened out to reflect that, but the repetitive flat tone only makes one want to quietly set the book down and take a walk outside—even if outside is a wasteland.

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