No sooner do I make a ham-fisted stab at pinning down flash, when I discover Hobie Anthony's remarkable and incisive blog where he lays everything and more out on the dissecting table in perfect clarity.
Leap-frogging from there, I discover Stefanie Freele's Sisters, which is a complete revelation in how the story form can be re-invented in a micro. If you haven't read it, I recommend doing so, right now. It's very short.
The title keys the piece, which uses simply 'The younger' and 'The older' to switch between the reciprocal actions of two sisters. There's a kind of numeric structural underpinning that carries the story, something Freele makes more explicit with a line about the younger sipping 'her third.'
Freele, I think, makes a virtue of a limitation here - by squaring a story on its structural opposites. The two sisters are points A and B. The 'third' turns out to be the reader/writer, their engagement also made explicit in a powerful ending.
I think here, the usual conceptual resonance thing is neatly subverted by a structural resonance.
So, that just shows how long a way there is to go.
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