=Book recently read: Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World =

I'm in the habit of saying that I have a short attention span. I repeat it all the time until even I believe it. I'm inordinately, irrationally fond of claiming such a distinction. Almost as if it were something of which I'm proud. But the truth is, it isn't true. 

My attention is as focused as a laser. It's virtually unbreakable. Unwavering. I'm practically rigid with attention, like a cat focused on a mouse hole. What's true, however, is that my attention is focused away from the world; it's aimed entirely within.

The world is a distraction. Little more. 

I'm totally absorbed in the ongoing conversation inside my own head—a monologue, really, is what I suppose you could call it, between myself and myself that's been taking place for as long as I can remember—a conversation that precedes memory itself.

It's the only thing that truly interests me.

I don't remember how the conversation started. What I do recall is lying in bed at night talking myself to sleep, drowning out the angry voices of my parents arguing downstairs.  I recall walking the circumference of the school playground at lunchtime, friendless, utterly alienated from the other children, boys and girls alike, fitting in with neither, and compensating for this extreme, inhuman loneliness by conducting elaborate interior conversations, dividing my consciousness into two, four, six or more voices.

I recall…well what difference does

it make what I recall. I could 

recall ad infinitum early 

examples of my complete self-absorption,

my worlds of make-believe,

my turning inward from

the loud threatening interruption of the world

around me and the people in it.

Because to this day, that's by and large

what I consider the world and other people to be:

an interruption of the only

conversation that truly matters.

I find it difficult to pay attention to

what anyone is saying to me,

unless it's something of extreme immediacy
and importance, unless it's a confession
or an emergency,
some taboo sexual admission, 
a secret intimacy,

or the recounting of some

awful tragedy

or act of violence they've experienced. 

In other words, someone has to have something really interesting to say to make it more interesting than what I find being said inside my own skull. And even then, 

it's not long before I hear the voices inside

me editorializing upon 

whatever it is I'm hearing.

So flash fiction is about the only kind of fiction that I can attend to with anything like my full attention
what little I can spare for the world outside me. 

This anthology is a middling example of the flash fiction form. The stories, as the title indicates, are international in origin, so there are a variety of voices, cultures, and viewpoints represented. 
Most of the contributors are not well-known. 

All well and good and not that it matters. For the most part, great flash fiction strikes like lightning from out of nowhere, and that means it can issue forth from the most anonymous of pens.
More importantly, in an anthology, is the number of lightning strikes.
There weren't enough here.
 What I found even less satisfactory was the overriding conventionality of the stories selected. With rare exception, these stories were straightforward narratives never straying far from the

tenets of traditional realism. 

The only thing that made them unusual

 were that they were very short.

So?

So this: I consider flash fiction to be a substantial departure from ordinary fiction. Virtually a separate genre altogether. I expect it to be different not just in terms of length, which, when all is said and done, is the least important consideration, but more importantly in terms of tone, perception, invention, & idiosyncrasy of vision. I expect flash fiction to offer me a different take on narrative altogether, not only in terms of word count. It's the brevity of the form that makes this radical innovation possible. Simply put: you can do things in this micro-form, reach places inaccessible to longer forms, and you should, it's the whole point.

The stories in this collection don't often reach those places. At least not often enough for my liking.

Still, it was a good read overall because even when the stories were less than interesting, less than original, less worth wasting time and eyeball on, they were at the very least…very short!

And that meant that I could get back to what was almost without exception the far more riveting conversation going on inside my own head.