Selected

Microfictions

1. Charles Baudelaire, f. Poems in Prose (1869)

DEDICATION To ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE

MY DEAR FRIEND:

I send you a little work of which it cannot be said, without injustice, that it has neither head
nor tail; since all of it, on the contrary, is at once head and tail, alternately and reciprocally.
Consider, I pray you, what convenience this arrangement offers to all of us, to you, to me
and to the reader. We can stop where we wish, I my musing, you your consideration, and
the reader his perusal—for I do not hold the latter's restive will by the interminable thread
of a fine-spun intrigue. Remove a vertebra, and the two parts of this tortuous fantasy rejoin
painlessly. Chop it into particles, and you will see that each part can exist by itself. In the
hope that some of these segments will be lively enough to please and to amuse you, I
venture to dedicate to you the entire serpent.

I have a little confession to make. It was while glancing, for at least the twentieth time,
through the famous Gaspard de la Nuit, by Aloysius Bertrand (a book known to you, to me,
and to a few of our friends, has it not the highest right to be called famous?), that the idea
came to me to attempt an analogous plan, and to apply to the description of modern life, or
rather of a life modern and more abstract, the process which he applied in the depicting of
ancient life, so strangely picturesque.

Which of us has not, in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose,
musical without rhythm or rime, sufficiently supple, sufficiently abrupt, to adapt itself to
the lyrical movements of the soul, to the windings and turnings of the fancy, to the sudden
starts of the conscience?

It is particularly in frequenting great cities, it is from the flux of their innumerable streams
of intercourse, that this importunate ideal is born. Have not you yourself, my dear friend,
tried to convey in a chanson the strident cry of the glazier, and to express in a lyric prose all
the grievous suggestions that cry bears even to the house-tops, through the heaviest mists
of the street? But, to speak truth, I fear that my jealousy has not brought me good fortune.
As soon as I had begun the work, I saw that not only was I laboring far, far, from my
mysterious and brilliant model, but that I was reaching an accomplishment (if it can be
called an accomplishment) peculiarly different—accident of which all others would
doubtless be proud, but which can but profoundly humiliate a mind which considers it the
highest honor of the poet to achieve exactly what he has planned.
Devotedly yours,

C
B

THE COUNTERFEIT MONEY

As we were moving away from the tobacconist's, my companion carefully sorted his
money: in the left pocket of his waistcoat he slipped little gold pieces; in the right, little
silver pieces; in the left pocket of his trousers, a mass of coppers, and finally, in the right, a
silver two-franc pieces that he had particularly examined.

"Singular and minute distribution!" I said to myself.

We came across a pauper who, trembling, held forth his cap.—I know nothing more
disquieting than the dumb eloquence of those suppliant eyes which hold, for the sensitive
man who can read within, both so great humility and so deep reproach. Something lies
there which approaches that depth of complex feeling in the tearful eyes of dogs that are
being flogged.

The offering of my friend was much more considerable than mine, and I said to him: "You
are right; after the pleasure of being astonished, none is greater than that of creating a
surprise."—"It was the counterfeit," he answered tranquilly, as though to justify his
prodigality.

But in my miserable brain, always busied seeking noon at two p.m. (of such a wearying
faculty has nature made me a gift!), the idea suddenly came that such conduct, on the part
of my friend, was excusable only by the desire to produce an occasion in the life of the poor
devil, perhaps even to know the diverse consequences, disastrous or otherwise, that a
counterfeit in the hands of a mendicant can engender. Could it not multiply itself in valid
pieces? Could it not also lead him to jail? A tavern-keeper, a baker, for example, might
perhaps have him arrested as a forger or a spreader of counterfeits. Quite as well the
counterfeit coin might be, for a poor little speculator, the germ of a several days' wealth.
And so my fancy ran its course, lending wings to the spirit of my friend and drawing all
possible deductions from all imaginable hypotheses.

But he abruptly burst my revery asunder by taking up my own words: "Yes, you are right:
there is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he expected."

I looked into the whites of his eyes, and I was frightened to see that his eyes shone with an
undeniable candor. I then saw clearly that he wished to combine charity and a good stroke
of business; to gain forty sous and the heart of God; to sweep into Paradise economically; in
short, to entrap gratis the brevet of charitable man.

I would almost have pardoned in him the desire of the criminal joy of which I had just now
thought him capable! I would have thought it curious, singular, that he found it amusing to
compromise the poor; but I shall never pardon the ineptitude of his calculation. One is
never to be forgiven for being wicked, but there is some merit in being conscious that one
is;—the most irreparable of all evils is to do wrong through stupidity.

both taken from Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed. T. R. Smith (New York: Boni and
Liveright 1919)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47032/47032-h/47032-h.htm
2 -- Robert Walser - “Two Strange Stories" (1913)

The Man with the Pumpkin Head

ONCE there was a man and on his shoulders he had, instead of a head, a hollow pumpkin.
This was no great help to him. Yet he still wanted to be Number One. That’s the sort of
person he was. For a tongue he had an oak leaf hanging from his mouth, and his teeth were
cut out with a knife. Instead of eyes, he had just two round holes. Back of the holes, two
candle stumps flickered. Those were his eyes. They didn’t help him see far. And yet he said
his eyes were better than anyone’s, the braggart. On his pumpkin head he wore a tall hat;
used to take it off when anyone spoke to him, he was so polite. Once this man went for a
walk. But the wind blew so hard that his eyes went out. He wanted to light them up again,
but he had no matches. He started to cry with his candle ends, because he couldn’t find his
way home. So now he sat there, held his pumpkin head between his hands, and wanted to
die. But dying didn’t come to him so easily. first there had to come a June bug, which ate the
oak leaf from his mouth; there had to come a bird, which pecked a hole in his pumpkin
skull; there had to come a child, who took away the two candle stumps. Then he could die.
The bug is still eating the leaf, the bird is pecking still, and the child is playing with the
candle stumps. ”



The Maid

A RICH lady had a maid and this maid had to look after her child. The child was as delicate
as a moonbeam, pure as freshly fallen snow, and as lovable as the sun. The maid loved the
child as much as she loved the moon, the sun, almost as much as her own dear God Himself.
But one day the child got lost, nobody knew how, and so the maid went looking for it,
looked for it everywhere in the world, in all the cities and countries, even Persia. Over there
in Persia the maid came one night to a broad dark tower, it stood by a broad dark river. But
high up in the tower a red light was burning, and the faithful maid asked this light: Can you
tell me where my child is? It got lost and for ten years I have been looking for it. Then go on
looking for another ten years, said the light, and it went out. So the maid looked for the
child another ten years, in all the parts and on all the bypaths of the earth, even in France.
In France there is a great and splendid city, called Paris, and to this city she came. One
evening she stood by the entrance to a beautiful garden, wept, because she could not find
the child, and took out her red handkerchief to wipe her eyes. Then suddenly the garden
opened and her child came out. She saw it and died of joy. Why did she die? Did that do her
any good? Yet she was old now and could not endure so much any more. the child is now a
grand and beautiful lady. If you should ever meet her, give her my best regards.”

From: Robert Walser. “Selected Stories.” trans. Christopher Middleton and Others (New
York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982).




3. Jamaica Kinkaid, "Girl" (1978)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/06/26/girl




4. Lydia Davis -- from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (1986 - )

The Fish

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today.
Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her -- there is no one
else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a
slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, ad dismantled from its bones, and
fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now: violated in a final
manner and regarded wit a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of
her day and done this to it.



A Second Chance

If only I had a chance to learn from my mistakes, I would, but there are too many things you
don't do twice; in fact, the most important things are things you don't do twice, so you can't
do them better the second time. You do something wrong, and see what the right thing
would have been, and are ready to do it, should you have the chance again, but the next
experience is quite different, and your judgment is wrong again, and though you are now
prepared for this experience should it repeat itself, you are not prepared for the next
experience. If only, for instance, you could get married at eighteen twice, then the second
time you could make sure you were not too young to do this, because you would have the
perspective of being older, and would know that the person advising you to marry this man
was giving you the wrong advice because his reasons were the same ones he gave you the
last time he advised you to get married at eighteen. If you could bring a child from a first
marriage into a second marriage a second time, you would know that generosity could turn
to resentment if you did not do the right things and resentment back to kindness if you did,
unless the man you married when you married a second time for the second time was quite
different in temperament from the man you married a second time for the first time, in
which case you would have to marry that one twice also in order to learn just what the
wisest course would be to take with a man of his temperament. If you could have your
mother die a second time you might be prepared to fight for a private room that had no
other person in it watching television while she died, but if you were perpared to fight for
that, and did, you might have to lose your mother again in order to know enough to ask
them to put her teeth in the right way and not the wrong way before you went into her
room and saw her for the last time grinning so strangely, and then yet one more time to
make sure her ashes were not buried again in that plain sort of airmail container in which
she was sent north to the cemetery. (279)



Lost Things

They are lost, but also not lost but somewhere in the world. Most of them are small, though
two are larger, one a coat and one a dog. Of the small things, one is a valuable ring, one a
valuable button. They are lost from me and where I am, but they are also not gone. They are
somewhere else, and they are there to someone else, it may be. But if not ther to someone
else, the ring is, still, not lost to itself, but there, only not where I am, and the button, too,
there, still, only not where I am.



The Outing

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine
woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a
refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a
weeping among the bushes.

All taken from The Collected Stores of Lydia Davis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009).