Introducing Best Microfiction 2021, a collection of stories under 300 words, guest editor Amber Sparks describes “a hurricane blowing through these pieces, a sort of urgency you only find in writers in the midst of pleasure in pushing the envelope.” The contributors to this annual anthology, now in its third year, wholeheartedly embrace their roles as envelope pushers and hurricane wranglers — and they do so in very little space. The economy of storytelling in these pages is both ambitious and original, resulting in highly sensory and deeply personal tales, with powerful emotions captured in short, sharp constructions. This anthology of fleeting moments and unexpected revelations has a potency that, as a reader, you don’t easily recover from. It is a collection of lyrical gut punches.

Feeling and atmosphere guide most of these stories, while more traditional elements like plot and character take a backseat. Despy Boutris, who has two stories in the anthology, stands out as an expert scene-setter. The charged summer night of adolescence in “Forest Elegy” is marked by “the steady breeze, the chaos of hair,” while “Burials” conveys arid, apocalyptic desperation: “It was the year of burials, the year of fires and floods and winds so strong I started walking backwards.” Her atmospheres invade the senses in a rush, doing an astonishing amount of work in such little space. Understanding too much, too fast makes for an exhilarating read.

In other pieces, the writers lean heavily on voice — which is to be expected, as it allows the reader fast access to a character’s mindset. First-person and stream of conscious narration reign supreme. All the writers use first-person skillfully, but some take it to another level. Lauren Friedlander’s “Alice in Voreland,” for instance, is a fetish-fueled spin on Alice in Wonderland in which the narrator grows outlandishly large to fulfill her lover’s sexual desire to be eaten. “I swallowed her, most specialist pill, as she begged of me in dreams. Her final act: the happy shriek of eatenness, the last of her.” Friedlander’s narration has a poetic, Shakespearian playfulness. The invented language and singsong pacing pair perfectly with its dark humor, especially when, after such a wild set up, the narrator finally eats her lover and remarks: “She tasted of, well, nothing.” It’s a bittersweet line, funny but sobering.

There’s humor aplenty in these tiny tales, proving that microfiction plays nicely with absurdism, particularly in stories like “Tonight” by Hema Nataraju, which deals with the birth of a bearded baby; “Ted” by Evan Williams, an odd tale about a man and his family of worms; or “It’s Ghost Time Again” by Francine Witte, a story about a girl’s mother and her ghost lover. The humor works best when shaped by turbulent emotion that gestures toward some underlying discontent: disappointment, loneliness, identity crises, the overwhelming desire for meaning.

Many of the writers rely heavily on structure. Some favor repetition, as in “Med(i)a” by C.C. Russell or “Stella Is” by Claire Polders, lulling the reader before picking up speed to drive their stories home to poignant, surprising conclusions. Others favor lists, as in “Places I’ve Peed” by Epiphany Ferrell, “A List of Things that are White” by Matt Kendrick, or “A Short List Explaining Why I’m an Okay Person” by Kat L’Esperance-Stokes. The list format reflects their protagonists’ processing of their histories and psyches (after all, there’s something so human about filtering overwhelming emotion into easy-to-digest bullets, isn’t there?). But when the lists veer from poignant to monotonous, the stories threaten to bog down.

This is not so much a critique of the stories themselves, but of the list as a narrative form and perhaps of the structure of a collection itself. At times, the anthology itself resembled one of its many list stories. Does gathering stories employing the same techniques risk lessening the power of each story? As I read, I began mentally grouping certain stories, curious about the ways in which they played off one another. The pieces seemed to connect in ways that transcended form, and certain stories seem almost to converse with others. They have such presence and so much to say, both to the reader and to one another. This is one of the more exciting short fiction parties I’ve attended lately, and I desperately want to eavesdrop.

Several stories in Best Microfiction 2021 — “Alice in Voreland,” “B is for Balls” by Kara Vernor, “The Correct Hanging of Birds,” by Rosie Garland — have real staying power, leaving the reader to ruminate on what the future of (very) short fiction might look like. These stories — and many more that I don’t have the wordcount to mention — strike you in the funny bone and in the feels. Best Microfiction 2021 is a collection of 102 small beating hearts, a vibrant celebration of the form and of the literary magazines that champion it. It is inspiring to experience so many inventive reckonings with humanity, art, and very small word counts. In “When Mother Roasts Chicken, She Shines,” Joyce Ann Wheatley provides a line that epitomizes the whole: “I taste it then, the heart, how it deepens the flavor of everything.”

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