CPSC Micro-fiction #2

CPSC Notices 5/12/10

Rome Snowboards Recalls Bindings Due to Fall Hazard - The snowboard binding’s base plate can break at cold temperatures, posing a fall hazard to snowboarders. The firm has received 14 reports of base plates breaking. No injuries have been reported.

Remote-Controlled Helicopters Recalled by Imagine Nation Books Due to Fire and Burn Hazards - The rechargeable battery inside the helicopters can overheat, igniting the helicopter and posing fire and burn hazards to consumers. The firm has received 49 reports of the helicopters overheating, including six reports of flames coming from the helicopters, and one report of minor property damage. No injuries have been reported.

Microfiction 5/12/10

No one would die today. The small helicopter fell out of the sky, in flames. The controls dropped from my hands, and I did not see them land. I flew into the air, as my broken snowboard bindings caught upon the white blanket of snow. I heard a snap, and felt my feet begin to move separately from each other. The helicopter began to fly erratically, not responding to my commands. I sailed down the hill faster, eyes in the sky, watching the helicopter attain its target. The wind picked up as I took off from behind the tree where I waited. I launched the helicopter on its mission, sailing through the air silently, it's deadly package hanging below it. I put down the binoculars, knowing it was time. I looked at the men on the trucks, unaware I was stalking them from up the hill. I pulled the binoculars and the controls to the bomb from my white parka, two black objects against a pure white hillside. I would have to follow the bomb down the hill to stay in range. I had been practicing my snowboarding technique for weeks, preparing for this attack. I took a deep breath, and steeled myself for what I was about to do.

(I forgot to mention that the criteria I'm using for the micro-fiction is less than 250 words. If this gets boring, I might decrease it to 99 words, which for me anyway, is much more of a challenge.

CPSC Micro-fiction #1

CPSC Notices 5/10/12

A) Claire's Recalls Children's Metal Charm Bracelets Due to High Levels of Cadmium

B) The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced today that the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act's (P&SSAct) State Grant program is now accepting applications for funding from eligible states. The P&SSAct intends to enhance the safety of pools and spas by reducing child drownings and suction entrapment incidents and educating the public on the importance of safety devices and constant supervision of children in and around water. CPSC is the lead agency in implementing and enforcing the Act, which was signed into law in December 2007.


Micro-fiction 5/10/12

I found the letters, each a different shape, just lines really, all bent together. I drew them for father and he thought they were pretty. "You say they spell words?" I showed him how. He went down into his shop and he got out the metals--he melted and smelted and poured and pounded. Then he asked me again to draw the shapes. I did, and he slowly etched them into metal, one each on the clasps, twenty-two in all, and then fastened them into a band. He slipped it around my wrist. "Now you'll always have them with you."
I showed them Europa, and she thought they were neat. We went out by the pool to play while father took a nap. We tossed the bracelet back and forth, so light, so shiny. My letters flew back and forth between us as we sang. I threw them up high, and Europa missed. We could see them sink down below, in the clear water. "I'll get them for you," she said quickly, and dove in the water. I saw her go down. But she never came back up. Neither did the letters. I've forgotten Europa's little face. I still remember the letters though.

Microfiction and Product Death

I have a lot of literary balls in the air right now, so it's time to start committing a few to the Internet, to get them out of the way.

I've been thinking a lot about micro-fiction recently. At first I was against the idea of some sort of gimmicky constraint on the fiction-writing process. But then, after I tried writing a bit of micro-fiction, my perspective changed. The process by which one writes micro-fiction is different than simply writing. The space constraint means that each sentence must be packed full of meaning, taking the reader somewhere very purposefully. Adjectives are deleted, as is repetition. Sentence structure is made as minimal as possible, very efficient. You start discovering ways to hack the grammar, to say more with less. What subjects and objects can be dropped completely? When would simply a verb suffice as a sentence on its own?

A thing I always look at, in any sort of literature, is the assemblage of the writing. Sure, you've written something enjoyable of a certain length, it's a novel. But what does this novel attempt to do? Does it have a goal? Why or why not? What goals should writing have, if not just informative depiction, or entertainment? If it is less than a novel, what is it, and why? With micro-fiction, often the goal is a joke or a riddle. You let on only enough information for the reader to discover the "catch" by the time they get to the last line. Hemingway's "six word story" is one of these (and often the classic example of micro-fiction). The goal of that story is that you "get it", but only at the very end. The Joke formation is a classic trope-goal of human literature. It is like a vector model of motion: you move in one direction, and then another vector sends you in another direction. You thought you got it, but the punch line makes it mean something different, and NOW you "get it". There's nothing wrong with this; except, maybe that it is all do easy to use this as the "goal" when you have only a few words to use.

What else can micro-fiction do? What is worth saying in just a few words?

If you follow my Twitter feed, you might have noticed I have a certain preoccupation with the Consumer Product Safety Commission's product recalls. I follow their RSS feed (which is available through the link) with great interest. The interest is macabre--not quite dark, perverted, or Modernist enough to be considered Ballardian, but still there is something quite bizarre about the physical dangers of every day consumer objects. It's kind of like an infomercial coupled with a death announcement. Sharp blades, hazardous chemicals, high voltages, extreme temperatures, pinch and choke points, and deadly stored inertial energy are around us all day long, but normally sealed within lovely consumer design, like a butler with a pistol. The CPSC does fantastic work. We may think to mock the safety-conscious "nerds" who test every day products for any conceivable danger, but the days of caveat emptor have been replaced by strong protections against the profit-seekers. Most recalls come from these elaborate safety laboratories, protecting us from the danger we need never know. And yet, if you search the CPSC's public records, you will find that several product recalls a year do not occur without registered deaths and serious injury being attributed to faulty design, materials, and construction.

A consumer device--something so innocuous and common-place--can also be the symbol of any person's particular death drive. The death we seek out, and pay for, in the form of convenience and good design. Death lurks under all of our desires, the entropy at the end of the joke that is our lives.

Perhaps micro-fiction and consumer-hazard were meant to be together. The short, consumable package, the encased, enclosed, economically-packaged power--and the end result, the final toll, the end of the story. Maybe together, they can find a meaning for each other.

I'm going to write a micro-fiction story inspired by each day's worth of CPSC recalls, and publish them here (amid my other blog rambling). Not every CPSC recall is interesting, and they may not come out every day. Not every story I write will be interesting, either. But at least they will be short and easily consumable. And in some of them, we may just find the product we've been searching for. I'll continue the experiment until I recall it, or until it's made obsolete.