SELECTION OF FLASH FICTION FROM:

Groyon, Vicente Garcia (ed). Very Short Stories for Harried Readers. Manila, Milflores
Publishing, Inc., 2007.

FLASH FICTION SET A:

1. COFFEE BREAK
2. PROSODY LESSON

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COFFEE BREAK by Ana Maria S. Villanueva

Only a thin glass wall separated them, but the cold space between represented a
great distance. She was a hundred miles away as she pressed her lips on the rim of her
cup. He could see himself on her fair face. His wide-eyed reflection bounced on the glass
surface, distorted and made ethereal by her ghostly complexion on the other side of the
glass wall.

He had been watching her ever since he first came to this café. The first time he
saw her, she was sitting where she sat now. She always picked the table outside the
coffee shop by the door where she could watch the pedestrians hurrying home after
work. Sometimes she would stretch her thin neck to catch the last rays of the sun. Light
would fall softly on her cheek as she read a hardbound book. Thick dark lashes
contrasted starkly against a white face. On the rare instances when she would look up
she would stare into space, and he wondered, who is she thinking of? What is her
name?

Today, he found a vacant table inside the coffee shop set right across where she
sat outside. Only a glass wall separated them. Looking through the glass, he sat and
bathed in her presence as he did day after day. He almost felt like he knew her.

He knew the gentle slope of her back or how a strand of hair would escape from
behind an ear and fall on the soft line of her jaw. He had traced the ridges on her collar
bone over a dozen times his eyes carefully traveling the length of the clavicle until it
rested on the hollow below the throat. He memorized the lines that creased her
forehead when a dark thought crossed her mind.
 He understood the shapes which her dreams took on the edge of his sleep. He
knew her breath and the invisible clouds they formed over her steaming cup. He felt
how her palm fit the curve of the warm mug. Many times, he tried to read the
soundless words that were on the tip of her tongue, but they melted with the heat of
the coffee before they could escape her lips.

Her lips, he knew them well. He knew how it felt to touch them with his. Briefly
he closed his eyes and felt the soft moist flesh gently pressing against his lips, forcing
them to open slightly and surrender. “The first kiss will be this kiss by which all others in
your life will be judged and found wanting.” He remembered the line from that Stephen
King book he read the other day as he imagined what it would be like when their lips
would meet for the first time.

Did she even read King? he wondered as he opened his eyes and watched her
turn a page from her book. He couldn’t make out the title. He wanted to tell her about
the obscure bookstore he discovered the other day, certain she would delight in the
dimly lit store stacked with old hardbound books abandoned by their owners, books
that had been read under the soft sunlight, books with coffee rings on the cover jacket.
He would tell her about it and offer to buy her coffee. Should he go up to her now? Tap
on the glass and smile? Surely he was a familiar face. She would remember him as the
guy who always ordered a hot mocha java while he sat deep in a couch, his nose buried
between the pages of a paperback (when he wasn’t watching her).

His musings were interrupted as she suddenly looked up and stared right at him.
It was a brief moment that spoke of the many intimate nights he spent with her in his
dreams. The look that pierced the glass represented the thousands of seconds they had
shared, holding hands in his head.

Their eyes locked as he drowned in dark pools. In that brief moment he saw
nothing. Except for his reflection in the mirror of her eyes, he did not see himself. He
was just another stranger, one of the pedestrians who decided to make a quick stop for
a caffeine jolt.

Soon as the lock was broken, he took one last sip of his coffee. It had gotten cold.
The taste was flat in his mouth.

He swallowed and then walked out of the door

GUIDE QUESTIONS:

1. Who is the narrator of the story?

2. What narrator point of view was used?
3. Aside from the current visit of the narrator in the coffee shop, how many previous visits were made by
him? Where do we see proof of your answer from the text?
4. What is the narrator’s epiphany?
5. When was synecdoche used in the story?

KEY TERMS:

1. Flash fiction
2. Narrator and narrator point of view
3. Epiphany
4. Foreshadowing

EXERCISE:

1. Jot down 3 things you would have done differently if you were in the shoes of the narrator.
2. List down 3 short stories or 3 films that have a similar situation in Coffee Break.

PROSODY LESSON by Paul S. De Guzman

Now what one wants to tell the other is, “There is someone else,” except
that neither of them knows that they have the same plan. They sit down to
dinner. In their minds they still rehearse the ways to say it. Trochee plus dactyl.
Iamb plus anapest. Trochee plus anapest. Spondee plus dactyl. They lift their
forks, wondering if meaning changes with rhythm, and how.

“Great food,” he says. “Yes,” she says, “great food.” They smile, go on
eating and continue imagining the sound of that one sentence said in various
ways. Hours pass.

Somewhere someone waits. A woman in a bedroom, surfing the Net,

constantly clicking on a mouse, waiting for a phone call. A man in a car, outside
the restaurant, his blinkers going on and off, waiting for someone to come down
and tell him something.
“It’s done,” is in fact, what the woman and the man want to hear repeatedly. She
imagines hearing it in trochees, echoing the sound of mouse clicks. He wants it to
take the rhythm of the blinker’s iambic ticking.

They wait for a few more hours, until she decides to log off and he drives
away.

GUIDE QUESTIONS:

1. Why was the story titled Prosody Lesson? (hint: look up the words prosody, trochee,
dactyl, iamb/iambic, spondee and rhythm)
2. Who is the narrator and what narrator point of view was used?
3. Who are your round and flat characters in this story? What’s your basis?

KEY TERMS:

1. Round and Flat Characters

2. Irony
3. Figure of Speech: synecdoche
4. Epiphany

EXERCISE:

1. Try to come up with two alternate endings for the story.

2. Try to see if the story will be as effective with the use of other narrator point of views.
Which narrator point of view is best for Prosody Lesson? Why do you say so?