From one of the folks behind the smart UK zine Tangents comes Fifty Word Fiction, a new zine that seeks to publish what might be the shortest stories possible. If you think 50-word fiction sounds suspiciously like a creative writing workshop exercise you'd be right: the mag owes its genesis to an assignment a friend of editor Alistair Fitchett distributed to her students. Fitchett told his friend the assignment was impossible, but, he says, "I dashed off to try my hand at it anyway. Fifteen minutes later I had my first fifty word fiction written, and a day after that I stuck up this website. Such is indeed the beauty of the web: hardly any lag time between conception and execution. But can these micro-stories — perhaps the ultimate hyperbolic expression of flash fiction? - really amount to anything more than tune-up exercises or pallette cleansers for would be novelists? The jury's still out, though there's some intriguing work waiting to be discovered here. Some of the pieces decidedly feel like homework, as in Paul D. Pfeiffer's untitled 50-worder about a motorcycle accident in which, regrettably, just to make word count it would seem, "fall's remains" replaces "leaves." Other pieces are merely jokey, and some are real groaners, like Ben Myers' "Reasons for Divorce":

"Did you just fart?"
"No. And I'm offended you even asked me that."
"Sorry."
"That's OK."
They stared at the screen.
" But you did though, didn't you?"
"Christ, what is this?"
"Just admit it."
Five minutes later, straining, he followed through. Three weeks later she found herself a solicitor.

Some entries, however, are honestly memorable: because of their compression, the collision of images or appeals to the senses they contain in so few lines; they are not-quite-poems - certainly poem-like, as can be said of the best flash fiction as well; for instance, Ethan Paquin's Mezzanine III:

The average American mall has two levels, lots of open space and marble flooring, even wishing fountains. One can buy pizza, Chinese, sandwiches, bagels, hamburgers. Cotton, rayon, polyester, latex and wool. Britney, Mandy, Christina, Jessica, Penny and Jackie. Spaces where girls debate with friends what boys taste like.

Or the following untitled piece by Sandra Tappenden:

We sat round the fire like runaway boy scouts. We were all deprived. Someone old enough to know better ripped off a line from Monty Python and the reference was beautifully lost. A man ran up to the flames and wanted to stick his head in; someone talked him down.

That 50 Word Fiction has managed to attract interested writers is perhaps less an indication that, like Fitchett, some scribblers will try anything (i.e. in the hope of belt-notching another publication credit?), and more telling of how fiction writers continue to search for web-friendly ways to ply their trade. Certainly, this is one kind of web-published fiction that doesn't leave you reaching for the bottle of eye drops.