Reviewed by Isaac Fox
Bob Thurber’s 2019 collection In Fifty Words!: Micro Fictions is made up of eighty-five works of flash fiction, each exactly fifty words long. In those tiny spaces, Thurber offers up an array of fleshed-out characters and worlds.
These stories range from science fiction (such as “Legally Blind,” which is about a bionic grandfather) to romance (pieces like “The First Time I Gazed Into My Wife’s Eyes”) and even surrealism (“Piercing Arrows,” a slippery narrative about memory and time that literalizes cliches and refuses easy answers). However, despite the diversity of his work, Thurber’s collection feels cohesive, with numerous themes and tropes recurring across stories. Parent-child relationships, loss of loved ones, and religious ambiguity pop up again and again, as do fairy-tale retellings.
Other connections feel more specific, almost personal. For example, in “The Breathtaking Stink of This World,” the narrator describes what their father says he’ll miss most after death—the diverse, vibrant scents of life. Several stories later, the narrator of “The Stench of a Lifetime” (perhaps the same character narrating “The Breathtaking Stink of this World”?) describes their father’s smell lingering in his home after he passes away.
Thurber’s control of tone in these miniature narratives is masterful. The premise of “Legally Blind” is absurd, but the piece itself has a melancholy, hard-edged weight to it. “The Leaking and the Legacy”—a story about two balloons—becomes something multifaceted and even tragic through its spare, understated dialogue. And just as pieces with absurd premises become surprisingly serious, stories that start with beauty or tragedy become suddenly funny. “The Mapmaker’s Calligraphist Daughter,” for example, carefully describes a woman’s intricate calligraphy before clarifying what she’s printing: false maps that her father commissions to send her suitors on wild goose chases. And even then, the joke isn’t only a joke. Sure, it sounds funny, but does this woman want her father meddling in her relationships? Has he forced her to turn her craft, her art, into her own prison?
The precision of “The Mapmaker’s Calligraphist Daughter” is not unique within In Fifty Words!: Micro Fictions. Thurber’s stories frequently evoke similarly complex reactions and questions despite their incredibly short length, or maybe because of it.
Isaac Fox is a student at Lebanon Valley College, where he majors in English and creative writing. When he’s not reading or writing something assigned, he’s probably reading or writing something unassigned. His prose, reviews, and photography have appeared in Tiny Molecules, Rune Bear, Heart of Flesh, Green Blotter, and Rejection Letters. You can find him on Twitter at @isaac_k_fox.