Despite its modest length, the short short story has a long and proud pedigree, stretching from the animal tales of Aesop and the Panchatantra to the baby shoes story often misattributed to Hemingway, to the Palm-of-the-Hand Stories of Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Yet there’s something eerily contemporary about stories of one thousand words or fewer, more commonly known as flash fiction today. [1] As our attention spans, our capacities for focus and memory and reflection, are forcibly cut into a million pieces, I wonder if we’re all becoming an ideal audience for practitioners of the form.

There are the TikToks, obviously, the Tweets and the Letterboxd reviews and the Hydra’s many other heads—micro-stories that are, for good and ill, part of the fabric of our daily lives. And, thanks to the tag team of Dread and Exhaustion that follows us offline, the constant grind of paid work and unpaid work like childcare and housekeeping, the perennial fog of fascism-induced cortisol … thanks to all that, sitting and focusing on one long, unbroken work of prose for an uninterrupted hour feels, some days, about as difficult as bench-pressing a skyscraper.

All of which came to mind as I read The Deep Forest, Sofía Rhei’s ambitiously strange, kaleidoscopic collection of original fairy tales, translated from the Spanish by Kendal Simmons. Rhei is a prolific writer of poetry and speculative fiction for children and adults. While the Kinder- und Hausmärchen of the Brothers Grimm are a clear influence, Rhei also cites the microfiction of Anna María Shua and Espido Freire as inspiration. There are almost three hundred short short stories squeezed into this particular small purple volume (one of which has appeared right here at Strange Horizons). The longest story I found has only 577 words, most have fewer than 500, and the shortest I could locate has only fifteen. Some stories have titles, but most don’t. The cumulative effect of reading hundreds of such stories in a row was disorienting, even factoring out all the societal mindfuckery outlined above.

I’m taking some time to get to the substance of the tales both because reading and analyzing such an assortment of such brief stories posed an interesting challenge and because the stories themselves were hit or miss for me. Many conjured a memorable image or epiphany or a real shudder, causing me to fold down the corner of the page to mark my satisfaction. Others simply conjured a puzzled face. Nevertheless, the misfires were dispensed with quickly, and my review copy was fat with folded pages by the time I finished, so we might as well talk about some of the stories that struck home.

Many tales draw their power from a frank acknowledgement that men and marriage are dangerous and, in some cases, best avoided entirely. In one early story, a princess promises her hand to a prince if he settles her kingdom’s debts; when the time comes to hold up her end of the bargain, she severs her hand at the wrist and gives it to him, discharging her obligations. Another story, “The Monster”, runs thus:

When the girl grew older and no longer had those terrible nightmares, the monster found a way to escape. He then stole a body and asked for her hand in marriage.

She did not recognize him. (p. 32)

Here, as elsewhere, Rhei deftly employs one of flash fiction’s greatest strengths: implication. The story takes on added menace because we don’t know the specifics of the nightmares, the circumstances of the monster’s initial defeat, the mechanics of the body theft, or the details of the likely predation that awaits. Or take this succinctly horrific exchange, from a story in which a young girl is forced into marriage with a dragon:

“Did you know that dragons are born when a flaming serpent incubates a brown chicken egg?” said the girl to the dragon.

“How ridiculous,” replied the dragon, showing her, painfully, exactly how the children of dragons are made. (p.14)

Eventually, the young woman gains safety and freedom with the help of a magic acorn that prolongs her pregnancy by nine years. As with the behanding, escape comes at a steep price, and is the best of a few bad options.

Some of these stories do end, like the classics, with the possibility of a happy marriage, but only after a long period of subterfuge, compromise, and negotiation. In one example, a woman cursed with great beauty avoids unwanted male attention by hiding beneath a wolf’s pelt, like Thousandfurs. She takes shelter in the garden of a man claiming to be a wild boar and comes to love him, or at least lose her fear of him. In another story, a tree gifts one year of its life to a young woman, in exchange for a poem written during that year (a sort of magical writing grant). She spends the year entangled in a love affair with a young man who turns out to be the tree spirit, whom she agrees to marry at the year’s end. “In exchange for just one year,” writes Rhei, “he had received an entire lifetime” (p. 19). The stark depiction of danger, trade-offs, and compromise makes these occasional happy endings all the more affecting.

Several memorable stories revolve around art and creativity. A painter accepts commissions from progressively smaller beings and uses progressively smaller canvases: coins, pumpkinseeds. A poet writes a biographical work about a ghost, on the condition that the ghost will hang a bell around the neck of the poet’s muse, so that the muse can only work when inspiration is nearby. A boy’s grandfather scares him into going to bed by telling him a story about three cats “with eyes that glowed red like the seeds of a pomegranate” (p. 54); when the boy grows up and becomes a grandfather in turn, he refuses to terrify his own grandson and keeps the story to himself. A monk watches the drawn figures of an illuminated manuscript come to life, “licking his skin and his eyes as they did” (p. 65).

Rhei’s eye for detail, her ability to make a nightmare cat or living illustration memorable and tactile with a handful of words, instills these stories with playfulness and danger. Her dark, Cryptkeeper-adjacent sense of humor also provides some excellent examples of flash fiction as a showcase for the macabre. A boy takes pleasure in being told that snowflakes are the souls of angels because he takes it to mean that “during the summer, nobody had been watching” (p. 130). A man believes he is hunting fairies in a variety of disguises, when in fact the fairies are killing and resurrecting him in increasingly ridiculous forms, for their own amusement. One story culminates in a wonderfully bleak punchline about cannibalism, far too good for me to spoil here.

Rhei also takes advantage of flash fiction’s versatility, the freedom with which it can depict unorthodox images and metaphors, their impact in turn heightened by the form’s brevity. Future witches dream of houses that self-assemble from rockslides and wind-blown branches; another witch, on dying, dissolves into salamanders that go to warm the houses of her loved ones. A woman untangles an intangible knot in the heart of a ghost. In one of my favorite stories, “The Little Flame,” a sick woman miscarries, recovers her health, and forgets that she was ever pregnant.

Not every gamble pays off. There is a long stretch of stories near the middle that read like a first round of brainstorming from the Twilight Zone writers’ room, when it’s late and everyone just wants to go home. A carpenter cures his own coffin to protect it from woodworms, then reincarnates as a woodworm. A countess disguises herself as a naiad to seduce an old king, only to learn that he hunts naiads. As a painter matures, his eyes ripen and fall out like fruit, whereupon a baby eats them. Art is, of course, subjective, but stories of the above type didn’t work for me, and there were too many of them for my liking.

There were also some baffling word choices, all the more glaring in a format where every word carries more weight. When a descriptor like “ginormous” or a phrase like “old with age” creeps in, I don’t know whether to lay that at the feet of the author, the translator, or the editor, but somebody should have talked to somebody before such oddities saw print.

In the introduction to his new English version of Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (2012), Philip Pullman writes, “If you, the reader, want to tell any of the tales in this book, I hope you will feel free to be no more faithful than you want to be. You are at perfect liberty to invent other details than the ones I’ve passed on, or invented, here. In fact you’re not only at liberty to do so; you have a positive duty to make the story your own” (Pullman, p. xix). [2] The Deep Forest offers a comparable invitation to the reader—not to make the story our own in the telling, but to make the book our own in the reading, to sift through information overload and seize on the stories out of hundreds that resonate with us. The version of The Deep Forest that worked for me, that made sense to me when I was stealing snatches of reading time between doomscrolling and supervising my kid at the museum, may be completely different from the version of the book that you’ll enjoy. Maybe the eye-eating baby will work for you. The images and ideas that hold your beleaguered attention, that linger in your increasingly spotty memory, may have little to no overlap with mine. In that way, too, Rhei’s fragmentary, frightening collection is of our time.

Endnotes

[1] My favorite contemporary example is from Robert Swartwood’s Hint Fiction anthology (2011), a story entitled “The Return” by Joe R. Lansdale, which simply reads, “They buried him deep. Again” (Swartwood, p. 33). [return]

[2] Pullman’s volume ends with an example of nineteenth-century German flash fiction, the 223-word story “The Golden Key.” [return]