Breakfasts for spies

O'Flannery's cafe is designed for spies, laid out to maximise the number of corners. Despite being a cheap cafe, it has a staffed cloakroom where items are only rarely deposited and collected by the same person. The menu is your basic English greasy spoon, but alongside the all-day breakfasts are Eastern European favourites like borscht and goulash. They've recently added some stodgy Chinese dishes. The owner, Alan O'Flannery, was born Alan Grey. The original O'Flannery vanished - maybe to a shallow grave or to run a Vietnamese bar. Rival spies often break the ice in meetings by sharing their theories.

Background

This story is a drabble, exactly 100 words long. The form is named for a joke in one of the Monty Python books, where a drabble is defined as a competition won by the first writer to complete a novel. In the 80s, the Birmingham University Science Fiction Society turned this into a game, settling on 100 words as a good length for the novels produced.

I've written a few other drabbles, including Instagram Famous and Animal Costumes. A great (and very subtle) example comes from Dave Langford: A Surprisingly Common Omission.

I write a lot of pieces that are shorter than 100 words, so a drabble feels like a lot of space to work with. It allowed me about 30 words to go into detail about the menu at O'Flannery's cafe. I’ve sometimes written drabbles on paper, which is fun, laying them out in a 10x10 grid to help with the counting. There’s an interesting and instructive challenge in balancing the exact length with getting the right wording.

Mini-Sagas

The problem with microfictions is making sure there's an actual story. It's too easy to emerge with a description of a story, or even a joke. The piece above comes close to not being a story, although there is, just about, a narrative arc for the original O'Flannery.

Brian Aldiss worked on what he called ‘mini-sagas’ - 50 word stories - and ended up judging 33,000 of them in a Daily Telegraph competition. Back in 2012, the Friday project published 50 of these in 50 x 50: The mini-sagas.

For me, the hit rate in this book is quite low. There are several which are simple jokes, or that self-reference their brevity. One of them resolves with the line "The hen in the previous mini-saga was annoyed". Another is a 50-word container for a 6-word-story. A tiny biography ends with "so much life crammed into fifty words! Amazing!"

But there are a couple that are great. Jocasta Speaks is a dialogue between Oedipus and his mother. I loved A Salty Sacrifice, a horror story that begins, "Exceptionally low tides on the Norfolk coast revealed a sunken cathedral."

The one that sticks in my head most is It Came from Outer Space, which sets out an interesting scenario, where a great warrior is unwilling to defend against an alien invasion, but ends: "I awoke – another SF dream!" It seemed like a cop-out.