Flash fiction: feeding a demographic composed of people without much time to read but with plenty of time to think. I used to think of flash fiction as a pompous intellectual commercial; there is something buried in there, but more often than not it doesn't want you to know what it is. The burden lay with the critic. But then I happened upon a little thing called the internet, where flash fiction has been allow to flourish outside—and even influence—academe. Amy Hempel, an author who writes in a very flash-fiction, minimalist style uses the following lines in her story "The Man in Bogotá," which textualizes my eventual change nicely: "It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive [...] He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good." The internet has without a doubt promoted the art of…
