The Flying Lie
By Will • Sep 2nd, 2009 • Category: Flash“You know why flying cars sell so great?”
“Why is that?”
“I’ll tell you,” he says with that used-car-salesman tone that implies the word if is on its way. “But,” dammit, “you can’t tell Hodge I told you.”
“Okay,” I say. No point in telling him Hodge was dragged to death behind a very-much-earthbound car yesterday.
“Okay. Here it is: flying cars are easy sells because nothing ever goes wrong with them. Absolutely no practical downside to owning one of them.” He smiles, all upper teeth. “Dream come true.”
“Except. For the, you know,” I let it hang there for a second, but he doesn’t see it, “fact it’s not true.” He squinted and shrugged, then went for his coffee. “The part where they don’t exist.”
He slurped off the top of his mug. Under the table, I push the recorder closer to him. “Well, like it says on the brochure, we sold a dream. An experience.”
“No,” I correct him, finger pointing up between us, “you told them they could take these cars home.”
“And McDonald’s tells people that a clown loves them.”
Will is a mooncalf and a scalawag. He writes for money and is the co-founder of Gameplaywright Press and Jet Pack.
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This is what the best flash fiction does:
It kicks my brain. It tells me, “This is just the tiniest ittiest-bittiest peak of the mountain.”
So much more story exists here. The dead guy behind the car. When is this set? How did the dream get this far without reality backing it up? Who are the people that got screwed? Who is our protagonist?
Juicy.
– c.
I’m afraid that I must quibble with my esteemed colleague. To my mind, it’s not flash fic unless it offers some semblance of a resolution. This reads more like an excerpt.
I’ll heartily agree, however, that it’s quite interesting. You establish an impressive number of intriguing hooks in just a few lines of dialogue. Also, I love that if-but-damn bit. Hilarious.
It leaves me wanting more, but was that the goal?
–Dan
This was first written at Ficlets, where the length of the piece was enforced to 1,024 characters, and where possible sequels may be written by anyone. So, yeah, I was trying to write something that was distinctly the middle of something else. At the same time, this is how the scene popped into my head, so I wrote it as I saw it, without much worry for the larger picture.
I thought the last line might provoke a sense of resolution — not a fixed one, but like it might be the line that sparked the protag to act — but I’ve been wrong before (and I was writing more for to fit into length).
I wrote this write after reading a WIRED article about a guy who old electric car dealerships to people without ever producing an electric car. It was a crazy, sprawling, big-money scam that somehow went on and on, ruining people who believed in it.
[...] Some killer new stuff over at Jet Pack. Wood’s got Rebecca and the King of All Snails, which you’ll love, and Will’s got a little taste of a fallen future in The Flying Lie. [...]
In that case, the piece does exactly what it was meant to do. So many hooks… I think I’d have worked on the guy who was road-hauled to death, but I have a morbid streak.
Fascinating story. (http://bit.ly/4lkRlG) I love the illustrations.
–Dan
I spent much of the last 24 hours being very sick, and so missed this. I promise I shall plug it tomorrow.
This reminds me in the smallest way of a sketch from Chris Morris’ Jam. In a good way. It is blackly funny, and although I am not conversant enough with the definition of flash fiction to know if this counts, I like it as a piece that says something.
Dan, that’s the very story, all right. Thanks for finding that.
I’ll be honest, I’m not so well versed in flash fiction that I know for sure where the excellence is. The flash work I’ve done is, for the most part, so short that it’s testing the edge of the form, not the depth of it, I think. But I’m learning.
By no means am I an authority. Just expressing an opinion. IMHO, YMMV, WTF, WYSIWYG, and so forth.
–Dan