The 50-Word War
The true story about flash fiction, ambition, delusion, and mercy.
I have an entire year of stories ready to submit.
Twelve stories. Twelve dates. Twelve small charges wired to a clock.
I built it last February during a stretch when I couldn’t sleep, and the dog couldn’t either.
Keylea found me at the kitchen table at four in the morning. She asked what I was doing.
I told her I was getting ahead.
“Ahead of what?” she yawned.
“The rules.”
Fifty words. Exactly fifty. Title doesn’t count. You get one shot. One story a month, submitted by the fifteenth.
She frowned, wished me luck, and went back to bed.
Fifty-Word Stories publishes two stories a day. One early. One late. Ten a week.
One becomes Story of the Week. One of those becomes Story of the Month. At year’s end, one gets Story of the Year.
Then the winner and author are inducted into the 50-Word Stories Hall of Fame, which sounds ridiculous until your name appears there. Then it becomes an ancient and noble institution. Marble. Torches. Possibly a gift shop.
My first submission anywhere won Story of the Year.
I stayed humble for almost eleven minutes.
Then I got curious about the competition.
Over twelve years, only seven writers had made it. One man had won five times.
Five times.
This man, whom I won’t name because I’ve never met him, and because he has done nothing to me except succeed in public with a biography that pulls a little wagon behind it.
This man has a reputation. A state of residence. His bio doesn’t walk into a room so much as arrive with footnotes.
This legend has books. Awards. Anthologies. Credits in literary journals and magazines I’ve actually heard of. Schools use his work. To teach, I suppose. Writers, I imagine.
Come to think of it, that may be the one thing his bio doesn’t cover in great detail.
My bio reads: Paul D’Arcy tells stories. All real. Most brief.
That’s the whole thing, and I loved it. Until I saw his.
Then my beautiful simplicity began to look less like clever restraint and more like the help arriving at a wedding in dirt-caked gardening clothes.
He was officially on my radar, this Legend.
I read his website. This was my first mistake. I read his stories. This was my second. Some were good, which seemed unnecessary. Some weren’t as good as the bio promised, which comforted me in a way I won’t defend.
Then he disappeared.
Not dead.
Worse.
Unpublished.
Months passed. Nothing from him. Nothing since my induction. Or coronation. No one had used that word, of course. But I had made peace with that little faux pas privately.
I told myself I’d knocked him off the wall. Dethroned the old champion. Sent him back into the Massachusetts fog with a shawl and a notebook and no appetite.
There was no evidence for this, of course.
Evidence would’ve ruined it.
But then, three months later, he reappeared.
I imagined him returning from holiday abroad, reading the announcement, setting down his tea, rubbing his wrinkled, liver-spotted hands together, whispering,
“So. It has come to this.”
Again, no evidence.
But then he wrote:
The Hall
[a 50-word story]
The old champion found his chair occupied by a younger man polishing a medal with his sleeve.
He smiled, fetched a ladder, and climbed the wall where winners’ names gathered dust.
“Lovely engraving,” he said, taking down his portrait.
“But halls are not graves. They are rooms with doors open.”
Exactly fifty words. Courteous. Threatening. Vain enough to leave fingerprints.
So the next month, I replied:
Scheduled
[a 50-word story]
On January first, he loaded twelve envelopes into the future, each addressed to judgment.
February smiled. March behaved. April waited patiently.
Then a former champion cleared his throat online, and the envelopes trembled like horses at the gate.
“Steady,” he told them, while sharpening a sentence with teeth at midnight.
The following week, he answered:
Etiquette
[a 50-word story]
The younger man sent a duel invitation folded as a thank-you note.
The champion admired the paper, the restraint, the little stain where hunger had touched the corner.
At dawn, he arrived. Unarmed.
“Forgive me,” he said. “At my age, one learns the blade is already in the bow.”
Clever.
Annoyingly.
But I parried with:
Restraint
[a 50-word story]
The younger man practiced bowing until his back hurt. Then he practiced not bowing. Then he wrote a story about a knife, removed the knife, removed the hand, removed the man, and left only a table set for two.
“See?” he told his wife. “No blood.”
She hid the towels.
At this point, I think we both began to understand the true contest.
It was not between this unnamed man and me. He may be kind. He may be generous. He may have forgotten more about flash fiction than I will ever know.
He may also have a bio that requires its own parking space.
But this contest was not between him and me.
It was between the part of me that wants to tell the truth. And the part that wants the truth to win a prize.
It was between “All real. Most brief.” and “Please also note: internationally admired.”
It was between Story and Scorecard.
But then, he dared:
The Duel
[a 50-word story]
They met at dawn, carrying paragraphs too large for the rules.
“Fifty,” said the judge.
They nodded, then spent forty describing the fog, five bowing, three coughing, one forgiving.
There was no room left to wound anyone, which infuriated them both, because mercy had won on a technicality again today.
So now I had a decision to make.
I could keep my year of scheduled stories intact. Dignified. Orderly.
Or, I could break formation and submit something petty, elegant, deniable, and exactly fifty words long before the fifteenth of this month.
I knew which choice would make me a better man.
I also knew which choice might make a better story.
Then, the email arrived.
The subject line: my name.
The sender: his.
Paul —
I hope you don’t mind the reach. I’ve been reading your work on the site for a year now and wanted to say so.
The piece with the daughter inviting her father’s old friends to his funeral stayed with me for weeks. I read it to my wife. She made me read it again.
There’s a thing you do with the ending. You don’t end it, you just stop, and the reader keeps going on their own.
I’ve been trying to learn how to do that for thirty years.
Anyway. I’m a fan. Keep going.
— [his name]
I read it on my phone standing at the kitchen sink.
I read it again sitting down.
Keylea was at the table, fingers tapping client notes into her laptop.
She stopped. Looked me over.
“What?”
I didn’t answer.
Then she looked at me the way a nurse looks at your chart.
“You’re white as a ghost,” she said.
Now, back at my desk, my cursor blinks.
Forty-seven words of apology arrive immediately.
None of them any good.