(In this issue's High Five, author Joseph Young discusses his five "flash" stories.)

Concentrated Inconsequence

Four of the five stories I've included here are very short, a couple pages, the other about nine. Four of the five stories are in first person, the fifth a first-person tale within the larger third-person frame. Four of the five stories are funny, as well as sad and tender, the last both of these. A different story is the odd one out each time. All of the stories are about little of consequence, no deaths, no divorces, no childbirths, no great changes of direction in the characters' lives. All of the stories nonetheless are of heightened experience, heightened language and feeling, each line a silver knife-flash of character and scene. Each story makes me ache through with sadness, or hope, or love, or disaster, and every time with envy. This is the story I want to write I say, each time. This is the story I have to read I say, each year. This is the best story, the most excellent, perfect story.

"Only the Dead Know Brooklyn," Thomas Wolfe

Four pages told in dialect, the narrator recites the story of a man who wanders the streets of Brooklyn because he found their names on a map and they sounded like nice places. The man asks the narrator how many people have drowned in Brooklyn:

"'I don't know wathca mean,' I says. 'Neveh hoid of no one drownin' heah in Brooklyn, unless you mean a swimmin' pool. Yuh can't drown in Brooklyn,' I says. 'Yuh gotta drown somewhere else—in duh ocean, where dere's wateh.'

'Drownin,' the guys says, lookin' at his map. 'Drownin.'"

A funny and eerie story, the last lines bring home the sad hauntedness of the title.

"The Searchlight," Virginia Woolf

The prototype, manifesto of flash fiction: "After pausing to prod some unsuspected spot, the light wheeled, like the wings of a windmill, or again like the antennae of some prodigious insect and revealed here a cadaverous stone front; here a chestnut with all its blossoms riding." The story in the story is of Mrs. Ivimy and her grandfather's telescope, he standing in a stone tower and looking out at the moor, the lens picking up brief bits of life until he finds a beautiful girl. There was something blue on the girl's head, Mrs. Ivimy says, as, here on the balcony, many years later, the searchlight looks for enemy planes. "'Oh, the girl,'" she says, in answer to her friend's questions. "'She was my—' she hesitated, as if she were about to say 'myself.'"

"Emergency," Denis Johnson

The longest of the five stories and the most famous from Johnson's famous collection, Jesus' Son. Johnson has a gift for language and for combining the grotesquely funny and the sublime. After running over a pregnant rabbit and cutting out its eight unborn bunnies to save them, Georgie, the orderly, and the narrator, Fuckhead, come upon a vision:

"We bumped softly down a hill toward an open filed that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers graves. I'd never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity."

Denis Johnson is the heir to O'Connor and her portrayal of hallucinatory religious ecstasy.

"Pet Milk," Stuart Dybek

"Pet Milk" give me chills, beginning to end. It's compressed happiness and loss, language that doesn't so much tell a story in time as it is a series of moments in no-time.

"The radio played constantly. Its top was warped and turning amber on the side where the tubes were. I remember the sound of it on winter afternoons after school, as I sat by her table watching the pet milk swirl and cloud in the steaming coffee, and noticing, outside her window, the sky doing the same thing."

The best of all possible bittersweet endings.

Gloomy Tune, Grace Paley

This is the very short story of Bobo, Bibi, Doody, Dodo, Neddy, Yoyo, Butch, Put Put, and Beep. As the narrator says, "Some are girls and some are boys." The moment Yoyo gets mad at Chuchi Gomez, about three quarters of the way through, is one of smallest, most tender sorrows told in any story.