I Call This Flirting: Stories (review)

After years of reading Sherrie Flick's short short stories in literary magazines across the country, it is a delight to see the best of them all together in her first collection, I Call This Flirting, winner of the Flume Press Chapbook Prize. The chapbook size is perfect for short shorts – the collection echoes the beautiful brevity of the form, yet Flirting also is plenty long enough for Flick to create an arc of mood and emotion that develops much like a novel.

Initially, I'd say the theme of Flirting is love, but Flick's stories are far from candy hearts and Valentines. Sometimes love is sweet, but more often love ends chewed up, spit out and ground into the sidewalk. Even as Flick writes of the first flush of new love and the willful naiveté that goes with it, she still includes its dark side. In "The Way You See It," the narrator falls for the beautiful man who smells like "earth and sweat and leaves," but we immediately discover he has left her, and that love "is an ocean, pounding and pounding on the rocks." The reason she falls for the wrong man in "The Way You See It" is the same reason the narrator makes the questionable (though delightfully salacious) decision to seduce a paperboy in a later story. The narrator – and the stories in Flirting do sound as if they emanate from the same narrator throughout, whether she speaks in first, second, or third voice – sees the pieces rather than the whole, tunneling her vision so she doesn't have to admit what she already knows.

It's this tunneling of vision that I think is the true theme of Flirting. There is so much we don't know or don't want to know – about each other, about the world, about the future – it makes sense to put on the blinders and only focus on what fits into a single snapshot, to focus on what we can fit in our palms, and the short short is the perfect form for this concept.

Flick also uses elements of magical realism in her stories, playing with time and memory and character. In "The Paperboy," the title character is almost the narrator's puppet, in "Back" the narrator reverses time to erase her bland boyfriend, and in "Birds in Relation to Other Things," she invites the birds into her apartment for quasi-Socratic interaction, in which the birds ask questions that we can't hear, and that no one has answers to.

Flick's best stories are where she creates fictional stereotypes that are exquisite, whether they're funny and sharp, like in "Las Vegas Women" –

In Las Vegas women are made of polyester and plastic. They appear very authentic, fooling even the closest observer.

hot dog stands are funny. If you crack a joke in front of one of them, they pause as if they hear a rainstorm coming, then continue brewing coffee or counting postcards into stacks of twenty.

– or whether they're wistful and lovely, like in "Nebraska Men" –

In Nebraska men keep small colorful seashells in their mouths. When they speak, which isn't often, the soft roar of the ocean hums behind each word. In this way they are able to understand each distant coast.

It's wistfulness that separates the tone of Flirting from so many other cynical explorations of love, expressed in the fortune cookie epigraphs Flick puts before the four sections of her book – to believe in the fortune cookie fortune is just as silly as believing in true love, and yet we crack them open again and again if only because this time the fortune might come true. So despite the narrator explaining in "Digging" that "for women in my family, it's a genetic trait to seek unhappiness," Flirting has that undercurrent of hope, and Flick leaves the reader in the final section believing the narrator, despite all, has found happiness. From "Everything Here":

She sits down at the table with a cup of coffee. Steam...