The classroom door bursts open and Professor Brennan rushes in. He hurries across the room, slams his briefcase onto his desk, and stands staring at the whiteboard and the words he wrote only yesterday. Writing techniques like, “Brevity is the lifeblood of good writing. Employ your own experiences. Do not be afraid to shock your readers. Start bold, end bold.”

After a moment of silent reflection he turns to the several of us who have enrolled in his summer lecture series: Fiction in the Era of Instant Gratification.

“This minimalist movement has gone too far,” he says. “By now most of you know, or should know, that Hemingway himself promoted brevity. Demanded it, even. As I recall, he once wrote, ‘It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.’ But I doubt today’s writing style is what he had in mind.”

Professor Brennan begins to pace. He jambs his hands in his pockets. Sweat honeycombs his forehead. I look at my notebook and realize the effort I made to open it, in preparation for taking notes, has been wasted. Sitting next to me Jenny from Long Island leans in.

“Did you smell whiskey when Professor Brennan came in?” she says. “I thought I did but I’m not sure.”

“No,” I say. “He does look tired though, like maybe he slept in his car or something.”

“Stop staring at me,” Professor Brennan says to Jenny and me. “I know what you are thinking. Of course my profession is partially responsible for this tragedy. As writing instructors we all understood that every aspect of teaching would become much easier by downsizing from novels to short stories to flash fiction to micro fiction to one-sentence stories. At least with one-sentence stories writers were not so much bound by mandated word limits. There was a certain flexibility granted to this form. Still, we teachers encouraged this transition. Who wouldn't? But the bulk of blame must inevitably fall on the reader, for it is she who determines in which direction the market moves.”

“Why does he look so angry?” Jenny says. “My father drank lots of vodka and that’s how he looked sometimes.”

“Stress, probably,” I say.

Professor Brennan returns to his desk. He unlatches and opens his briefcase.

“My concern for the devolution of fiction reached the breaking point when three-word stories became de rigueur,” he says shuffling through various papers. “And yet I said nothing. I simply followed the pack, a lemming racing toward my own destruction and the destruction of the art form that has provided me a career in teaching. I was a coward. I am a coward. But no more. I am done. As of today I consider myself retired.”

He throws the handful of papers he has removed from his briefcase onto the desk.

“Your two-word stories from last week!” he says.

 He closes his briefcase and dashes toward the door. Prior to entering the hallway he pauses, turns, and with a smirk says, “I will leave you with this. A sample of fiction’s final metastasis, the one-word story: Ciao!”

Putting my notebook and pencil away I feel a tap on the shoulder. It’s Jenny.

“Coffee?” she says.