Welcome!

You’ve found the website of (very) short fiction writer Randall Brown. Below are some favorite compressed works. Enjoy!

“El Dinosaurio” (“The Dinosaur”), Augusto Monterroso

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
(“When [s]he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”)

“You Fit Into Me,” Margaret Atwood

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

from Michael McFee’s The Smallest Talk, one-line poems

Dead Party
Silence is the smallest talk

From Lydia Davis’s break it down

The Mother

The girl wrote a story, “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.

From Michael Martone, in The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction

IN THE TALLADEGA NATIONAL FOREST

Looking for the body, we found hundreds of burned-out lightbulbs in a clearing. Found four bodies, not the body we were looking for.

From Martha Ronk and the Poetry Foundation

In a landscape of having to repeat.
Noticing that she does, that he does and so on.
The underlying cause is as absent as rain.
Yet one remembers rain even in its absence and an attendant quiet.
If illusion descends or the very word you’ve been looking for.
He remembers looking at the photograph,
green and gray squares, undefined.
How perfectly ordinary someone says looking at the same thing or
I’d like to get to the bottom of that one.
When it is raining it is raining for all time and then it isn’t
and when she looked at him, as he remembers it, the landscape moved closer
than ever and she did and now he can hardly remember what it was like.