shortshortshort.com, Nov/Dec 2007

Pushcart and Nebula Award-winning author Bruce Holland Rogers gives subscribers a good deal: for ten dollars a year, they receive (by email) three stories a month. As Rogers says, “Thirty-six stories for ten dollars. That’s about twenty-eight cents a story.” They’re short stories, rarely longer than 2000 words, but in today’s nanosecond attention span market, Rogers’s shortshortshort.com may be just the treat for some spec fiction readers.

Dan, the protagonist of “Ten Thousand Lives,” must not have had a dysfunctional family; a childhood of cross-country journeys in his family’s camper left him with a desire to see more of the world, not less of it. Dan’s travels enable him to experience many parallel lives, to wonder repeatedly about what might have been. Then, thanks to the magic of, um, magical realism, Dan’s imagined lives become flesh.

“Ten Thousand Lives” is not one of Rogers’s more successful stories. Only superficially does he explore Dan’s obsession with travel and his lack of attachment to others. The protagonist’s transformation becomes little more than the means to a Twilight Zone-style end.

Better is “A Fine and Private Place,” another magical realist story, but here the transformation is not so much gimmick as effective metaphor. Susan’s desire to hibernate (which she acts on in the most literal way imaginable) is a powerful image for the experience of seasonal depression.

In “Tourist Photography,” the protagonist is lured from his chores by Donat Bobet (friend, neighbor, distant acquaintance?) with the promise of playing tourist in one’s own home town—in this case, Paris. Yet Donat’s idea of tourist photography is concrete: he likes to take photos of tourists taking photos. Stranger still, his camera lacks film; but Donat’s whimsy doesn’t end there, and what begins as caprice finishes in madness. The unnamed narrator remains an aloof observer, reporting but not commenting. Like Donat’s camera, Rogers’s protagonist is empty.

“In Queen’s Park” is an interesting study in paranoia. Is a single man lurking in the park intrinsically sinister, or are the pram-pushing mothers unduly suspicious? Yet Charles’s creepiness is undeniable. He thinks he can tell mothers from au pairs by the fine lines around the mothers’ eyes, and the degree of scrutiny he applies to the question would likely unnerve all but the most unobservant of women. Hard to say where the truth lies in this ultrashort short (just under 300 words), but my sympathies are with the pram-pushers.

Gabe, an aging copy editor, moonlights as a seasonal Santa in “God Rest Ye Merry Dashing Night Cookies.” The temp job sparks reminiscences of his evolving concept of Santa when he was a child. When a gift of cookies shows up at his door signed only “Santa,” Gabe has to choose. Will he do the safe thing and throw the cookies away, or does he still have the ability to believe? This is not a complex story, but sweet nonetheless. It’s a warm treat for the holidays.

Ultrashort short “The Special Relationship” is a confused rumination on globalization. Everything seems to bother the narrator—the lack of fish and chips wrapped in greasy newspaper, the advent of Starbucks and McDonald’s, an abundance of gray squirrels—but the Channel Tunnel seems to give him hope for revenge. Aside from being a brief character study of a change-averse curmudgeon, there’s not much substance to this one.