Short Form Mastery

“…everyone was there, everyone in the world” and this feels so true within the pages of Anthony Varallo’s new collection of stories, Everyone Was There.

Winner of many prestigious prizes, including the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for Out Loud (2008), Varallo, an associate professor of English at the College of Charleston and fiction editor at Crazyhorse, demonstrates his mastery of the short short form in these tight, dense, often mercurial and always intelligent, compassionate, and truly original stories.

The short short, also called flash fiction or sudden fiction (among other terms), has been characterized as a hybrid genre, something moving back and forth across the boundaries of poetry’s compression and the traditional short story’s character development and plot progression. Many of the stories in this collection fit that description. For example, in the surreal “Unfriend”, the narrator sits at his desk at work while a stream of people from his past “appear” to chastise him for things he’d done to offend them. After the third such figure appears, “I escape to the men’s room, but my neighbor’s brother…is just finishing up at the urinal, while my father’s Al-Anon’s sponsor wrestles a paper towel from the wall dispenser, and says, ‘For your father’s sake, I wish you’d reconsider.’” The precise descriptive details, as well as the progression of events, are familiar elements of the short story, and what is not said—reconsider what?—evokes poetry’s condensed claims that invite readers to extrapolate fuller, more considered meaning and context from what is.

Several stories employ a kind of dreamlike construct such as the one in “Unfriend” but there is also something larger and more thematic that unites them as part of a collection. In “The Boy,” we learn that “the boy’s parents often told him that if he didn’t stop misbehaving they’d leave the house without him. And one day, they did,” only to return many years (though just a few paragraphs) later, claiming they “…only wanted to teach you a lesson.” the mother crying, “Say you understand.” The details in between are precise and evocative, providing clues to so much of the backstory the short short form does not generally permit. Despite the unlikely premise, there is a universal truth here. When the boy (who is now a man) asks his parents, “Would you two like something to drink?” the father responds, “We’re not guests” and the italicized guests in response to their son’s treating them as such demonstrates how a lack of understanding can create the abyss that divides parents and their children, similar to what we imagine in the men’s room in “Unfriend.”

It is Varallo’s focus on what challenges us—impulsiveness, misunderstandings, lost opportunities, family, friendships, romance—that not only connects all the stories to each other, but connects them to the reader as well. In the stories that are more straightforward and grounded in familiar circumstances, Varallo continues to reveal his tremendous insight into shared struggles. Take for example the compelling “What Did We Do to the Hardings?,” which starts out conventional enough: “The Hardings were our neighbors for a little over three months, although we didn’t know them very well.” When the Hardings moved into the neighborhood, the narrator’s family left them a welcome gift—a pumpkin loaf—and then later that day invited them over for a drink. The invitation is for 7:00 but the Hardings, with their two children, arrive at 6:20. From the moment they arrive, they behave badly. Extremely badly. And then they abruptly leave. Then, and for years after, the narrator and his family wondered “What had we done to drive the Hardings away?” They acknowledge that their neighbors were angry and that they, the hosts, had merely responded in kind to a joke Jim Harding had made, and that although “it didn’t make sense whatsoever, we couldn’t help feeling that we’d done something wrong, some offense...