"For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."Those six words raise a lot of questions in the reader's mind: who is selling these shoes; where is the baby; is the baby dead; what state of mind is the seller in? And many more, it all depends on how you approach the little information you are given. The power of these short pieces of writing is what is left unwritten because it allows the reader to make up their own version of events. Hemingway's flash fiction piece can be interpreted in many different ways, you could assume that the seller has lost a child and is therefore attempting to remove any items that will remind them of their loss. The shoes the seller purchased may have been for a girl, they could have had a baby boy, or the baby may have simply never worn the shoes.
The reader's frame of mind is a key factor in how they decide what the six words actually mean. I genuinely think most people will go for a more morbid interpretation of flash fiction if that option is available - I don't think this because I assume most people are morbid themselves, I only say this because most people expect such a small piece of writing to be making a statement. A woman giving birth to a boy when she expected a girl, or a child never wearing a pair of shoes isn't that shocking and many people will think, what is the point of writing something if its meaning is something so mundane? I have to admit, the first place my mind visited when I read Hemingway's piece was: dead baby. Not sure how well that reflects on me personally, I'm a little disappointed that I instantly went for the clichéd, 'It never got to wear the shoes? Must be dead!' interpretation when it could just have easily been: 'Baby didn't like its shoes.'
I had a go at writing some of my own, see what stories they paint for you:
She painted his neck red.
The hallway emptied, she kept screaming.
The noise is louder now, closer?
She left him, in a doorway.
Blue lips, eyes-staring, what, cold feet?
Doors slam, footsteps in the snow.
Water in my eyes, fighting again.
