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Is it possible to capture a moment—be it spoken, unspoken, or filled with an evocative image—and put it into words? What makes a particular moment meaningful and emotionally powerful? In this issue, the creative literary section is filled with very, very short stories—fiction and nonfiction—about large and small moments, emotional experiences, simple gestures, and snapshots that capture the transience and impermanence of experience. Can we really capture a moment? Once a moment passes, is it gone forever? Can we hold onto it through its transformation into art and words? And is anything too short to be a story? Does a very, very short story need to have a beginning, middle, and end in the Aristotelian manner, or can the storytelling be nonlinear? Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words—“For sale: baby shoes never worn”—and he called it his best work.
We received an enormous number of submissions, and I want to thank Amanda Hirsch Geffner and Anja Behm for their careful reading of the creative works. Each of these surprisingly diverse and eclectic selections is less than 700 words. Some are about childhood imagination, nostalgia, unconscious doodling, and existentialism. We see imagistically a chance encounter with mannequins in Barcelona and read about one woman's fleeting relationship with a bird. But they all transport us in a very short time and capture essences of the human experience.