When lightning strikes

The great Kathy Fish posted on Bluesky about flash (super short) fiction as its own entity, not a shorter short story and asked what its authors aim for. I love the question so much I wrote this

To me, flash is lightning, illuminating and brief. It gets to us before our brains kick in. In aftermath it’s feeling, epiphany, emotion sunk in a vein before we can block it. Because it we don’t feel, the monstrous in us grows.

The longer the arc of a story, news reel, war, oppression etc, the more time we have to inure ourselves. We accept more and feel less, in intensity, variety or both. Glance up, what do you see? Blocked reproduction rights and healthcare, women as household products or property, threats to take over sovereign nations treated in real media as propositions we must debate the pros and cons of, slaughter in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere, your time, attention, identity, opinions, elections and livelihoods orchestrated and manoeuvred by a handful of broligarchs. Ten years ago, would you have agreed to all this? Any of this? Would you have batted it away saying it’s impossible? Are you still batting it away? Hoping it won’t all come for you? Tired? Fighting?

Pick any of these and some emotion is self-censored. The warrior can’t feel beyond their battle and fight. Those seeking protection in self-serving systems can’t feel shame, accountability or guilt or and steal fortune from the marrow of others. The venomously resentful can’t know compassion and claim special victimhood. We all hide something from ourselves. Sometimes that’s the right thing, trauma has its needs. But for others, flash is a low-risk opportunity to sneak behind our defences.

Why? Because here we are again, another cycle of war, violence, threats and cruelty. Hi 2025, born into slaughter, hubris, lies and taunting. In times like this cruelty feels inevitable. The monstrous is always inside us but requires the right conditions to thrive. We mythologically slew dragons and currently fight zombies in film, TV and games because we know the monstrous always lurks under our skin, unkillable, ready to be conjured and once conjured, to annihilate. Awakened it feels smothering, so dense that fight is futile. But unkillable is not the same as unstoppable.

It’s stoppable. Think of this surge as a massive wave, impossible to avoid as it smashes through you. But that wave isn’t a single entity, it’s a zillion tiny drops. Those drops are our thoughts, actions, beliefs, feelings. The wave can’t hold without them, it falls back into itself, inert. You can’t hold back a wave any more than you can stop a war, or courts turning a presidency into a monarchy, or battered institutions protecting their existence at the expense of people, or the sovereignty of nations and rights of groups and individuals being framed as debatable opinion. But you have absolute control over you. You can feel whatever you want. The wave needs you swept up in its parameters of anger, hate, despair, futility, resentment, aggrievement, resistance, numbness, exhaustion. It wants you so busy and barricaded you don’t have time to be shot in the heart by anything else. You might want that too. How can I feel any more? I’m busy. I’m tired. I’m barely hanging on. Flash doesn’t ask much, it’s an inhalation, and in that inhalation, worlds of yearning, love, abandonment, regret, remorse, hope, yearning, sweetness. In reclaiming emotions, you starve the wave.

Flash isn’t the only way. Whatever lets you remember what the monstrous relies on you forgetting works but in overwhelming times brevity helps. When you’re drowning there’s no time to build a boat.

OK. So what?

All you’ve done is accuse me of being an unwitting droplet and lobbied for a flash grenade to invade my defences and make me feel a bunch of probably uncomfortable things. What do you want from me? Well, nothing. Flash is an option. It’s a door, a possibility, a seed. But ideally once you’ve felt the emotion of the piece, you think about it. I’ve resisted in this post quoting things like ‘a single death is tragic, a million deaths are a statistic’ though it’s true enough to be a playbook and ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ but if we can’t identify emotions in ourselves, it’s hard to see them in others. It’s easy to see the monstrous in someone else and not coiling inside us. If an emotion hits it helps to think about what it is and how it feels to feel it and what potential it offers. This particular type of emotion isn’t a wound, it’s a seed. Its presence implies a necessary opposing state, a state in which something other exists. It is impetus, the spark of potentiality not for what or where we are but for what and where we can be. Your presence is required. Whether you sink into the inevitability or reclaim your emotions is up to you. You’re integral either way.

Note: Kathy Fish prompted this question but has nothing to do with this answer and may disagree with every solitary word. Blame only me if you hate this. But it’s meaningless to hate this. You have so many better things to do.