Abruptions: 3 Minute Stories to Awaken the Mind

By Jack Matthews

"Matthews stories are like friends from small towns: They are honest, warm, occasionally lyrical and as strange and idiosyncratic as the rest of us."
Arthur Sabatini (Philadelphia Inquirer)

During the last decade of his life, author Jack Matthews wrote a series of 1-2 page prose pieces (which he dubbed "Abruptions" or "very short stories that end abruptly").

Matthews had already published over 20 books of fiction with an astonishing variety of characters and plots. This last volume hints at a lot of characters and plots without trying to resolve them. Each abruption -- which rarely takes more than 5 minutes to read -- shed light on something unexpected, whether it be a character's view on life or the reader's notions of how the world ought to work.

Many episodes read like contemporary fables or sketches of quirky people from small midwest towns. Two older women have a long-running feud about what flowers should go on the fence between their houses. An actor makes a living out of playing the bad Nazi in movies. An owner of a movie studio in the 1930s throws out any audience member who misbehaves during a movie. An office worker is distracted by a pretty woman washing the outside windows.

Other stories sound like wild fairy tales. What if one superintelligent Siamese twin were conjoined with an idiot brother? What if a witch's curse caused every third word uttered by a person to go unsaid? What if a woman has terrifying dreams about a missing watch?

Some stories simply ponder the imponderable. Why do certain memories persist or reappear? Why do elderly people become set in their ways? Why do people become blind to certain things?

Matthews explains in the book's preface that abruptions "can reach down to dimensions of wonder and speculation that are commonly thought to be the proper domain of poetry." These stories are a fitting coda for Matthew's career as a storyteller. As deep and dark as these abruptions can become, they are told with simple language, flashes of humor and a sage's sense of wonder and irony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Personville Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370476015

Jack Matthews

Jack Matthews (1925-2013) was an Ohio fiction writer, essayist and book collector. For a 100% free sample of Jack Matthews stories on, check out "Three Times Time" (also on Smashwords).Author's Page: www. ghostlypopulations.comAlso check the Robert's Roundup of Ebook Deals for the latest Matthews coupons: http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/category/ebooks/roberts-roundup/

Book preview

Abruptions

Table of Contents

Preface

The Lesson

Walking on Words

Waiting

Smiles Found Social Lubricant

Questionnaire for Jonas Byrd

Importance of Beauty    

Flaherty Contemplates the God of the Bell    

Janitor of Pigeons    

Seeing Eye Man    

Travels in Life Land    

The Dance of Non-Existence    

Time is the River We Swim In    

Uncle Will's Song   

3 Steps Backwards   

Crazy Uncle

Transmittals

The Two Beautiful Daughters

The Character Actor

Arte Sopra Vita

Shiftlessness

Plato's Cave

Progeria

House Inside Glass

Realm Under the Boardwalk

Three

Price of Being

Last Chance

Terminal Questions

The Demi-Urge

Franklin and Francesca

Dead Man Singing

Questionnaire for a Soldier Killed in Combat

Practicing for Death

There, In That Far Land

Ralph

Girl Beyond the Glass

The Dipsomat

Elegy in Red and White

The Girl who Knew Magic

Inspiration

The Dawn of a New Species

The Young Collector of Old Glass

The Procrustean Slipper

The Perfect Audience

Hoffstetler

The Music of Hell

Mighty Morse

Gifts from Heaven

Silent Machinery

Free, Free at Last!

The Initiation

Other Ebooks by Jack Matthews

About the Author

About This Edition

Abruptions

3 Minute Stories to Awaken the Mind

Jack Matthews

Copyright © 2017 The Estate of Jack Matthews

Cover Design by Barbiel Matthews-Saunders

Published by Personville Press in Houston, Texas. This book was published originally as an ebook on October, 2017. Info about copyright, fonts, device support and version history can be found at http://www.ghostlypopulations.com/copyright and at the end of this ebook). This ebook (version 1.0.1) is sold without DRM and is available for purchase as an EPUB file. To report technical problems, contact idiotprogrammer AT gmail.com

You can also download a free Jack Matthews story sampler (Three Times Time) from any online bookstore or the author's website. For regular updates about Mr. Matthews and his writings, sign up for his email list on www.ghostlypopulations.com

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Preface

Abruptions are simply very short stories that end abruptly. While they are known by more familiar labels (e.g., Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction), I like the in-your-face brusqueness of the word abruptions.  Like parables, they seem to be almost all point, lacking the more comprehensive pointedness that enriches and complicates longer narratives. As abruptions, they can be conveniently and thoughtlessly dismissed as mere anecdotes – which, in a way they are, although there is nothing mere about them, for they can penetrate in ways not accessible through the longer, leisurely accounts of more conventional narratives.

Essential to their depth is their conciseness. By what is both presented and judiciously excluded, abruptions can reach down to dimensions of wonder and speculation that are commonly thought to be the proper domain of poetry. The depth to which they can reach is always and to some extent a function of what is both their genius as a form and their most obvious limitation, their brevity. Nevertheless, it is the narrow and pointed instrument that penetrates deepest.

Because of our instinct for a telling taxonomy, we are nagged by the question of whether abruptions are nothing more than what we are tempted to view contemptuously as, say, key situations or story ideas rather than finished stories – which is to say, the real thing.  To the extent that no quality can exist without quantity, it follows that if the latter is diminished, the former is necessarily affected, and in many contexts it is affected negatively.

So the question of what definition would best fit abruptions is as natural as it will eventually prove irrelevant. While they may seem to be nothing more than mutilated or apprentice narratives, they are nevertheless real stories in certain important ways, their brevity notwithstanding. Often, in a well-designed abruption, what might appear to be an amputation – a gratuitous chopping off of a story's end –is actually the final, sudden emergence of a latent theme in the story, fulfilling a pattern that has been at work beneath the surface machinery that drives the plot.

Abruptions can be seen as constituting a literary sub-genre, for they are as distinct from the classic short story as haikus from sonnets. And as already argued, their brevity is suggestive in ways incompatible with more conventional closures, and some form of suggestiveness is essential to all narrative – especially short stories, and within that division, the still more intensified class of abruptions.

Agonizing over whether abruptions are really stories or not isn't worth the effort: call them lawn mowers or dental floss if you want – but think of them as lenses focusing larger, more complex ideas or conceits. And the truism that great literature is dependent upon great readers could not be better exemplified than in a readerly interaction with a well-designed abruption, for its very abruptness presents a unique challenge.

So I hereby challenge you and welcome you to the game.

The Lesson

This was one of his first memories.  He was five years old and begged to join the older boys in their baseball games.  They finally relented, gave him an old glove that hung almost to his knees when he put it on. And to keep him out of the way, they placed him in the outfield beyond a ragged row of barberry shrubs.

From this position, the little boy couldn't see any of the other players.  Nevertheless, he faithfully kept gazing up into the sky above the little shrubs.  Waiting, waiting, day after day.

Then late one afternoon it happened.  He saw a dark point in the sky.  It grew swiftly bigger and bigger until it hit him in the face, knocking him down and bloodying his nose.

This was a mystical experience for him, and he never forgot the lesson, which is that there are some things which grow bigger and bigger, and then there is this brief blunt painful spasm of darkness, after which they are gone and you find yourself lying on the ground, looking up at the sky.

Walking on Words

A poet named Randall Byrd writes verses with thick felt-tip pens and black lumber crayons on sidewalks in his neighborhood, thinking of the sidewalk panels as pages, and cherishing their durability, along with their inescapable visibility, for pedestrians cannot ignore such poems, and their progress is like the compulsive turning of leaves in a book. 

Although possessed of a poet's sensitivity, and living a rather lonely existence, Randall is a husky young man, a weightlifter, who earns his living as a bouncer in a nightclub called Walt's Hollow.

One of his reasons for writing his sidewalk poems is the promise it gives of an expanded audience.  There are far more people who are unable to resist reading sidewalk poems than will ever actually choose to read poems printed in books or magazines.

Randall is faced with