The Photograph
by Kathy Fish
It's four thirty and the light is nearly gone, but you take a picture anyway. I bring you a coffee and brandy from the club car, the steam rises like a genie from your mug. You want to go back in? you ask and I shake my head no, it feels good out here. That woman from Alberta... you nod and laugh. We're rushing through a wall of snow now, blowing away from us like we're in a time tunnel in an old film. My hair is in my eyes, sticking to my cheeks. We watch the tracks, the dark pines. The photo will be dark and out of focus. It's good you can't see my face.
Copyright © 2006 Kathy Fish. "The Photograph" was originally published in Ink Pot #6. Reprinted here with permission.
Poetics of Flash: An Analysis of Kathy Fish's " The Photograph"
by Joseph Young
Those who describe flash fiction often make much of its relationship to poetry. It resides near its borderland, they say, clearly narrative, a story told in time, but also exhibiting many of the characteristics of poetry: rich, metaphoric language; compression; a reliance on nuance and suggestion rather than direct statements to the reader; etc. Rarely though do these descriptions go much further, exploring not only what flash shares with poetry, in terms of style and language and feel, but how in fact it may function in poetic ways. If a flash fiction can look poetic, sound poetic, read poetic, then mustn't it act poetically too?
The flash fictions of Kathy Fish, especially her shortest work (less than 200 words), are dense, richly textured, evocative, and often rather mysterious stories. They tend to elude quick interpretation, whether emotionally or thematically, and their fragmented story lines and quirky detail can leave the reader a bit puzzled, albeit thoroughly engaged.
Among her most interesting and, as we shall see, challenging, of flash fictions is the story entitled "The Photograph." At first glance, it may seem a typical enough flash—two people, we might assume a husband and wife, exchange a few words on the outer platform of a train speeding though a twilight of pine trees and snow. One of the characters, the "you" in the story, who we might take as the husband, snaps a photograph, about which the narrator tells us, "will be dark and out of focus." She also tells us, thus ending the story, "It's good you can't see my face," suggesting a whole range of possible meanings, but providing the distinct impression that there is trouble, stormy trouble, brewing within this brief tableau. Not much else appears to occur, and the flash is thus emblematic of its kind—a brief encounter between spouses that nonetheless swims in a vague, but intense, emotional turbulence.
And if that were indeed the total of what is happening in the story, it would be a success—that visceral, mysterious unease, so well echoed in the descriptions of the scenery, so well conveyed in the story's few words, leaves the reader emotionally satisfied yet straining for greater understanding, the hallmarks of an excellent flash. But that is not all the story accomplishes. In fact, it's only the beginning, for we have yet to address some of its more challenging aspects, qualities that allow these events, this narrative, to function not only as story but also as metaphor, a kind of poetry.
To begin with, we should take a closer look at the characters in the story. Thus far, we have made the assumption that they are husband, the "you" of the flash, and wife, the narrator. In reality, we have no idea who these people are and what their relationship is. And the fact that Kathy Fish assigns the non-narrating character the second person pronoun only complicates matters. Who is this "you"? Is it indeed the narrator's spouse? Why then address him (her?) in this way, as if the story were being told for his benefit? Or is she actually addressing us, her audience? Are we (the readers) "you"? Add to this the complications of attribution that Kathy brings to the story. "That woman from Alberta…," one of the character says, making reference to (can we assume?) another passenger. Is this the husband's response to his wife's comment that "It feels good out here," or are these also the words of the wife, at which the husband subsequently laughs?
The sense one gets when reading the flash is that Kathy is intentionally destabilizing the narrative, purposely withholding information, attribution, grounding for the reader. And if we are to take a closer look at the timeline of the story, this sense of instability only deepens. At the beginning of the flash, the narrator tells us, "It's four thirty and the light is nearly gone, but you take a picture anyway." She then brings her husband a coffee and brandy from the club car to where he is standing, apparently, on the outer deck of a passenger car. Where was she when he took the photo? Was she there, or had she not yet arrived from the club car? How then does she know he took a picture? The two of them then stand talking, all the while rushing through the snowy twilight, as if in "a time tunnel in an old film." The narrator at this point makes the comment that "The photo will be dark and out of focus. It's good you can't see my face." To which photo is she referring? One he took of her? One of the scenery he took before she arrived? Is the reference to the photo in the story's first line some sort of flash-forward to the picture he snaps at the end? Or vice versa?
Time in this small universe does not appear to run as we are used to; Kathy has destabilized it. These characters seem literally to be traveling through a time tunnel, an enchanted landscape of snow, speed, and even a "genie" that rises from the steam of a coffee mug. The question to be asked is, why? What does Kathy gain by turning her world topsy-turvy, throwing her readers into this (rather pleasurable) confusion? Why push her narrative toward such instability?
The answer, I believe, is that through this confusion we come to understand that there is no reason we must read the story exclusively from top to bottom. Time has become unmoored, character is fluid, and thus narrative, while at once serving to pull us through the story, also allows us to read around the story. In other words, the narrative makes comment on itself, stands in for some other purpose, becomes metaphor. And we need look no further than the story's title to see what this purpose is. The photograph to which the title refers is certainly the one the husband snaps, but it is also the photograph of the story itself. The story is a photo, a scene standing still in time, even as it proceeds. The moment this photograph captures is one of conflict and calm, movement and stillness, confluence of past and present. The story is, in fact, a picture of time itself.
Certainly it could be said that any story of any length has a self-reflexive, or meta, content. The opportunity flash gives the writer, and more importantly, the reader, however, is to hold the entire narrative in the mind almost at once. Beginnings, middles, and endings can be appreciated more easily as a group, and we can more readily see how a middle can influence an ending, an ending a beginning. The writer of flash fiction is thus in a unique position to make of her story something more, to set her narrative to purposes other than, or rather we should say in addition to, the unfolding of events. Kathy Fish has provided an excellent example of how this can be done. Her at once engaging drama is also a transparency through which we see the mysteries of time and space, a poem of subtle idea and complex emotion, a whirring train crashing through a snowy night.
Copyright © 2006 Joseph Young
This is Joseph Young's second contribution to The Angler. His flash fiction, "What Happened Was", was published in issue number two.