Maybe it’s because I read them in quick succession — literally finishing one and picking up the other, both in a single sitting — but I found these recent chapbooks by Matt Bell and James Iredell were thought provoking individually and more so in tandem. Each is a collection of very short (even micro-) fiction, often capturing a discrete moment of significance to the characters (not that such a focus is a surprise in flash fiction or short shorts or whatever the genre is called today).

Despite what they have in common, these books approach the moments of their stories in different ways. In Bell’s The Broken Leading the Blind, most of the stories depict a disruption or break from routine, such as a blind woman allowing her seeing eye dog to run unrestrained while she is dragged along behind knowing full well how their unchecked motion will end. But those endings, however inevitable they seem in the story, don’t actually come — there’s a sense that consequences will follow the disruptive moments, but the stories tend to end with the disruptions instead of reaching their aftermaths. The characters tend to be only aware of the moment they’re in, with suggestions of how they got there, as in “This Showroom Filled With Fabulous Prizes”:

She says, “You don’t drink anymore, but you used to,” and he nods without looking. “She says, “Are you quit for good?”

He thinks for a moment, says, “I’m trying to be.”

It’s not specific, it’s not full exposition, but it’s enough to give the character complexity and history within the quick, focused moment of the story, and that restraint makes the stories feel complete even if the lives of the characters aren’t.

Iredell’s Before I Moved to Nevada explores its moments in a wider way, with a stronger sense of characters looking backward from the aftermath of their choices. Sometimes it’s explicit, as when a narrator reflects,

It’s only now that I can look back and say what kind of idiot I’ve become.

Other times, in several of these quick stories, its a sense of knowing even while running from the scene of trouble that punishment has only momentarily been evaded, as when a night of excess is followed by consequences both immediate and suggestive of past and future problems:

Next morning my dad’s eyebrows peaked in a way only a father’s can. “Out of bed, sonny boy,” he said. “Time to clean up.”

So there’s a reflection on personal history in Iredell’s stories, but also — and I think this is what I found most rewarding — the personal is embedded in cultural and natural histories, too. Mountains, lakes, vineyards and artichoke fields, as well as reflections on the rewriting of Native America by Hollywood and the Donner party, all put these stories of individual choices and, perhaps, errors into a longer context of decisions and aftermaths and into a specific geography made up of a long chain of choices. Whereas the punch of Bell’s stories is a tight, efficient focus that avoids piling on more exposition than each story needs, Iredell’s draw their power from setting what seem like minor moments in regular lives into the broadest of contexts in ways that are always organic. Two very different approaches, and two rewarding collections.