Issue August 2010 Flash Fiction Online August 2010

“Bet you fifty!”

“Aw, make it worth while.”

“Two hundred!”

“You’re on. Let Jack hold the stakes.”

“Suits me.”

Four hundred dollars was placed in the hands of Jack Strong by the disputatious sports, and he carefully put it away with the lone five-dollar bill of which he was possessed.

Jack, although sportily inclined, lacked the cash to be a sport himself, but he was known to the two who thus disagreed, and they trusted him. He might be poor, but he was honest.

Nor was this confidence misplaced — at least so far as his honesty was concerned, although there might be question as to his judgment and discretion.

For instance, carrying that much money, it was a foolish thing to let an affable stranger scrape a barroom acquaintance with him when he stopped in at Pete’s on his way to his little mortgaged home. He realized that later. He was not drunk — positively, he was not drunk, for he recalled everything distinctly, but he did fraternize briefly with the jovial stranger. And in seeking his lone five-dollar bill, that he might return the stranger’s hospitality, he did display the four-hundred-dollar roll. It was all very clear to him the next morning, when he found nothing in his pockets but the change from the five-dollar bill.

Naturally, he hastened to Pete’s to learn what he could of the amiable stranger, which was nothing. Then he sought his sporty friends, and made full confession. They regarded him with coldly suspicious eyes, deeming it strange that one so wise should happen to be robbed when he was carrying their money. He promised restitution, but they were not appeased, for well they knew that it would take him about four years to repay four hundred dollars.

He went to the police, and the police promised to do what they could to identify, locate, and apprehend the sociable stranger, but there was still much in the attitude of the sporty pair to make him uneasy.

He remained at home that evening, having neither heart nor money for livelier places, and about eight o’clock he had his reward. The police telephoned him that they had the genial stranger in custody.

“Hold him!” he cried jubilantly. “I’ll be right down.”

He was rushing for his hat when his wife, who had been strangely silent and thoughtful, stopped him.

“John,” she said, “I’d like a word with you before you go out. Why have you deceived me?”

“Deceived you!” he exclaimed.

“Yes, deceived me,” she repeated severely. “I’ve suspected this duplicity for some time, and now I have proof. When I asked you for ten dollars yesterday you said you didn’t have it, but last night I found four hundred dollars in your pocket.”

“Howling Petey!” he cried. “Great jumping grasshoppers! I’ve had a man arrested for that, and two others are just about ready to beat me up! Where is it, Mary — quick!”

“I applied it to the mortgage,” she answered calmly.

Any time I begin a discussion of fixed forms, the first such form that I mention is the sonnet. Even if many readers can’t name the rules of a sonnet, they at least know that a sonnet is a short poem written to a set of arbitrary rules, and it’s easy to proceed from that example to a discussion of how a writer might compose by first choosing the rules and then, line by line, finding content to fit them.

Since the sonnet works as a good example of a poetic fixed form, I have tried smuggling the sonnet across the border between verse and prose. I have written flash fiction using various combinations of sonnet rules. Below are the rules for what I call the English Prose Sonnet and the Fibonacci Sonnet.

Before we consider the rules for prose sonnets, though, I want to explain where those rules come from, and for that we need to review the rules for a sonnet in verse. The two most reliable rules are that a sonnet consists of fourteen lines and that those lines are written in iambic pentameter. That is, each line more-or-less conforms to the pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (an iamb) five times. Sometimes the stress pattern is clear and perfect, as in the 13th line from Shakespeare’s sonnet 18: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see.” Sometimes the pattern is slightly irregular, but is close enough to five iambs in a row that the reader can still sense the underlying pattern: “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

Until rhyme are regular meter began to fall out of fashion, sonnets were also rhymed in some set pattern. Shakespeare’s sonnets rhyme abab cdcd efef gg. The final words in each line of a Shakespearean or English sonnet might be sky, deed, dry, weed, ale, ropes, tail, mopes, dreads, flare, reds, snare, find and mined. Sonnets written in the Italian rhyme scheme went something like abbaabba cdecde or abababab cdccdc, with a few other patterns allowed.

As you can see by the way I have written the rhyme schemes, sonnets are also broken down into stanzas. There are names for stanzas of various lengths. A stanza of four lines is a quatrain, a stanza of just two lines is a couplet. Shakespeare’s sonnets are three quatrains followed by a couplet. Italian sonnets are an octave followed by a sestet.

In all this technical structure, what interests me as a fiction writer is that the English or Italian sonnet each contains a rhetorical template. In Shakespeare, the first twelve lines establish some idea and the final couplet executes some kind of “turn” or even “twist.” The couplet might summarize the content of the preceding lines, but more often it offers a fresh way of looking at what has gone before. In Italian sonnets, the first eight lines often pose a question which the final six lines answer.

There’s no set way of adapting the fixed form rules of poetry to write fiction. My version of the English sonnet uses sentences, rather than lines, as the basic unit of measure. I have thrown out meter, but kept the rhyme scheme. I have kept the stanzas, but as prose paragraphs. Thus, the rules for my English prose sonnet are these: Fourteen sentences. The final words of each sentence rhyme in the pattern ababcdcdefefgg. Four paragraphs of four, four, four, and two sentences, respectively. The final paragraph tries to summarize or provide a perspective on the whole story, ideally inverting some expectation.

My prose version of the Italian sonnet takes a different approach, starting with not an Italian writer, but an Italian mathematician. Leonardo Fibonacci was the first European to note the properties of a particular sequence of numbers, starting with 0 and 1, that is derived by summing the two previous numbers in the sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144… This sequence appears in natural shapes (the branching of trees, the curl of a nautilus shell, the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower) and in population growth. The ratio between any two adjacent numbers in the sequence also approximates the golden ratio, which is a proportion that has been showing up in human art and architecture for thousands of years. The higher you go in the Fibonacci sequence, the more closely two numbers will approach this aesthetically pleasing ratio, a ratio that might define how much light area versus dark area is portrayed in a painting. For some reason, art that divides time or space according to this ratio pleases human senses.

Just why should this ratio, designated by the Greek letter φ (phi) seem more beautiful than some other ratio? Perhaps the answer is simply that we see the same ratio reflected in nature all the time. And the ratio of octave to sestet is a loose approximation of phi. (Eight lines to five lines would be closer.) For my second form of prose sonnet, I want to use the Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio.

The rules for a Fibonacci sonnet: Two paragraphs. Each paragraph consists of sentences that are defined by word count, the number of words determined by the Fibonacci sequence. A paragraph may count up in the sequence or down in the sequence but always starts or ends with two sentences of one word each. One of the paragraphs is once sentence longer than the other.

For example, a Fibonacci sonnet might have a first paragraph of sentences containing the following number of words in each sentence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. The paragraph might be sentences of 34, 21, 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1 and 1 words, respectively. Or the first paragraph might be sentences of 55 words, 34, 21, 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1 and 1 followed by a paragraph of 34, 21, 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1 and 1.

Ideally, one paragraph poses a question which the other paragraph answers.

As with all fixed forms in prose, I think that the story works best if the reader doesn’t immediately notice that the writer is playing according to some rule. In an English prose sonnet, I hope the reader doesn’t notice the rhymes, at least not on the first reading. With the Fibonacci sonnet, the sentence fragments of only one and two words are an obvious marker of the form, but I want a reader who has never heard of the form to read the story as if those short sentences were naturally occurring, as if that style choice were a perfect match to the subject matter.

Of course, my rules don’t have to be your rules. You’re free to interpret the idea of writing a prose sonnet in your own way, and you might look up other kinds of sonnet, too, such at the Pushkin sonnet or the curtal sonnet invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins. And, as always when you’re writing to a fixed form, you can use the form as a way to get started and them throw out every last rule as you revise.

“Fell Sorcerer, your evil reign is at an end!” Sathrus said. He flicked his long blonde hair to one side and raised the Sword of Khandalon above his head, rippling muscles ready to strike the fatal blow. “As sole heir to the ancient line of Khandar, I shall take my rightful place as King, and bring justice to the land — ”

A side door of the High Chamber burst open. Sathrus and his group of adventurers, comprising of Ekrus, the mysterious old man who had found him and told him of his destiny; Jarina, the beautiful magician; and Tarkro, the brave young street-thief, turned as one.

“Ah, there he is!” said a tall, handsome man holding a big sword. Behind him came an old man in a robe, a pretty girl in a dress that was frankly too revealing for the weather and a teenage boy in a patchwork tunic. The tall man walked over to Sathrus with a nonchalant air.

“Thank you so much for holding him for me. Now, fell sorcerer, I am Artheros, heir to the Crystal Throne! Your evil reign is…”

“I just said that,” Sathrus said, “Now if you don’t mind standing aside, I was just about to slay the Dark Lord and proclaim myself King.” Sathrus held his chin out and flexed his giant pectorals. The newcomer did the same. “Look, do you mind standing back? This is the Sword of Khandalon, you know. Needs a bit of room to get that full beheading swing…”

Artheros scoffed. “That rusty old thing? This is the Sword of Khandalon. Look at that inscription. Now if you would stand aside…”

“Hang on a minute,” Sathrus said. “I got this from the Tomb of Gralnir, guarded by the dread Dragon of the North. Where did you find that gilded knitting needle?”

“From the deepest cave under the fortress of Night-Tooth Mountain, over the Chasm of Gloom. We slipped by an army of goblins, disguised as washerwomen, then escaped through a laundry chute.”

“Pff. Look at this.” Sathrus pointed to a birthmark on his right shoulder, shaped like an eagle flying over a wolf. “The birthmark in the shape of the Royal Seal, as mentioned in the prophecy. See? Now then, I have a Dark Lord to dispatch…”

“Mmm, the likeness isn’t bad,” Artheros said, pulling his shirt sleeve up to reveal a similar mark, “but you can hardly make out the knife in the wolf’s jaws, can you? And what’s the eagle holding in its talons, a stick? On mine, you can clearly see the sceptre.”

“Look, Arthy-boy,” said Sathrus, “this is my Dark Lord and my kingdom now, so why don’t you just stand in the corner. If you’re quiet, I’ll make you a duke or a baron or something.” Sathrus squared up to his rival. Artheros did not move.

“I think,” Ekrus said, holding up a wizened finger, “I understand what has happened.”

“What?” both men said at once.

“The prophecy mentions an orphan child from the desert people, born in the east when the Maiden’s Star is under the moon.” Ekrus said. “Their life is hard and orphans are common. The eastern border of Khandar is thousands of leagues long, and that particular astral conjunction lasts the entire summer. Many children would qualify for the prophecy on those grounds, and out of those, it is sadly possible for more than one to have a birthmark that resembles the seal.”

“That’s all very well,” Artheros said, “but what about the swords? They can’t both be the right one.”

“Unfortunately, they could,” Ekrus said. “One of the few things we know from the thousand-year-old records, is the last King of Khandar was a keen collector of arms and armour. It’s very likely there are hundreds of such swords dotted about the land.”

“Hmm,” Sathrus said.

“Mmm,” Artheros said.

Sathrus put his hands on his hips. “I tell you what. Khandar’s a big place. Why don’t we split it? I’ll take everything North of the Rift Valley, you take the rest.”

“And leave you with all the major cities and their taxes? I don’t think so!” Artheros said. “Let’s split it East-West. I’ll have the Western lands.”

“So you get all the beaches and vineyards while I get the desert? No way!”

The two teams of adventurers drew their weapons and faced each other. The tense silence was broken when a grappling hook smashed through the window behind the Dark Lord’s throne.

A moment later, a muscular young man pulled himself up. Naked but for a loincloth and a cruel, jagged sword hanging from his waist, he wiped sweat from his brow and surveyed the scene.

“Thank you good nobles, for detaining the Dark One for me. I have come from the distant dunes of the east to fulfil the ancient prophecy…”

“Don’t listen to that impostor!” shouted another young man with a sword, coming up through a hidden trapdoor. “I have fought the terrors of the deep to make it here…”

“Lies! I am the one true heir!” said another, swinging down from a ceiling window.

“Hold on a minute!” shouted Artheros, after the room filled up with more chosen ones. “The sword, or swords, are supposed to be magically attuned to the heir of the Last King. There can only be one of those, and it’s me!”

“I’m afraid that’s a misconception,” Ekrus said, to murmurs of approval from the other bearded advisors crowding the room. “After a thousand years, it’s a mathematical certainty that everyone is related to the King in some way.”

“So we’re all heirs to the throne?” Sathrus said. Ekrus nodded. “Well. I’m sure there’s one thing we can agree on — the Dark Lord must go. We can all do it. Ready?”

“Hang on a minute, where’s he gone?” Artheros asked.

“He’s right here,” Sathrus said, pointing to where the Evil One had cowered just a moment ago.

There was no-one there.

“Ah,” Sathrus said. “Bugger.”