Difficult People

These spontaneous Zen portrait tales reveal destiny-imbued slice-of-life-moments or whole lives at a glance. Over the past decade I made a practice of handwriting a brief fiction tale in a notebook to start each day. Partly I did this as a stress relief from writing novels. With "flash fictions" I limited composition time to an hour or less. My stories, especially these short short stories, are unplanned. They are "seen" spontaneously in the blank screen of the inner eye. These impromptus depend on a minimalist core of actions and reactions to find closure. That puts them in the more traditional category of tales, folk tales, fairy tales, legends, myths or fables and erotica.