The Heart Keeps Faulty Time by Siân Griffiths is a perfect bedtime read, for those who need something to wind down in the evening or wind up in the morning. In this snappy collection of micro-fictions, Griffiths plays with magic and fantasy. Her stories will keep your imagination on edge with their sheer strangeness. Aliens, mermaids, dragons, and clowns abound. Some of these stories build up details slowly, as in “You Were Raised by a Dragon, What Was It Like?”, where the reader is bombarded with provocative questions detailing a child’s potential upbringing in a dragon’s nest. The exercise of creating a whole story out of questions was a fun, unexpected way of creating detail and possibility.
A lot of my favorite flash fictions stick with me because of an emotional note they manage to nail or a concept they skillfully unravel. There’s a sort of breathlessness a great piece of flash fiction leaves me with, because they are charged with creating an emotional stirring in so few words, so quickly. The story that most successfully shifted the matter inside me is “Everyone Fails.” The story is about a female superhero who is passed over by a superhero agency, not because she isn’t talented or skilled, but because she fails to perform the femininity and stereotypes of a female superhero. Maybe I liked it because the character is easy to relate to, what with her naivete crushed by the cold injustice of the world. There’s something very endearing about her idealism and her desire for the world to be meritocracy.
Perhaps my greatest criticism of the collection is that the some of these stories, though polished and well-written, feel like exercises, as if they were born from writing prompts, which according to Griffiths herself, some of them were. However, even in the stories that may feel like they are lacking an emotional core or concept to resonate from, there’s always enough details to make the experience of reading tactile and impressive. Take “The Persistence of Geese,” a strange story about waking up attached to a goose and needing to go to the butcher's shop to get it chopped off your body. Written in four short paragraphs, it’s vivid and descriptive, even if it doesn’t seem to reach for a greater meaning.
I recommend this book to folks, especially writers, interested in micro-fiction or Utah writers.