This prose style works mostly in Ruocco’s favor. “Flying Monkeys” features two women, the narrator and her row mate, Margaret, an intimate apparel saleswoman, on an airplane discussing topics that all boil down to dating and sex. “Margaret leans on the tray. We have one of those greasy windows so everything outside seems thicker. Maybe what’s inside seems thicker too, but you can’t look inside from outside unless you’re one of those flying monkeys, those weird guys, from Oz. It’s all kind of sexual.” The story, told entirely through dialogue, offers strange conversations, some of which barely make sense and employ absurd metaphor and punctuation.

     ‘I am down to my last frayed nerve,’ says Margaret. ‘It’s you-know-where. It’s in my you-know-what.’
     ‘Your fanny flower?’ I say. ‘Your fifi? That’s what happened to your French tips? You’re like, clam-digging?’ Margaret cannot impress me.
     ‘I date Europeans?’ I say. ‘I boffed this leathered Hollander? On Stage? In Holland?’

While not all of Ruocco’s stories are so insistent on covering feminine territory, the ones that have the most natural rhythm definitely are about women’s relationships and their anxieties about men. “Snake,” my favorite piece, stars the narrator and her best friend, Janie, on a desert road trip. The narrative slips between dream and reality, as the narrator drifts in and out of sleep to reveal her thoughts on the surly men she finds attractive, a clear-skinned snake in which she can see organs squirming around, and her memories of growing up with Janie.

     I remembered she had an easy-bake oven and she was afraid to get it dirty so we never baked in it one time. We watched it like a TV. If we had an easy-bake over, we could grow our babies in there. We could order sperm from a catalogue, or solicit contributions from well-built, literary homosexuals and mix a little baby cake. It would grow lean and light in the easy-bake over, and we’d just wait around for the timer to ding. Ding!

    Again, metaphors for the phallus abound. In this arena, Joanna Ruocco’s voice is witty and confident. Sentences stand out all over. “She has the Arc de Triomphe of teeth,” notes the narrator about a woman in a dentist’s office in “Ugly Ducks.” “Her smile emits this soft wattage,” goes the narrator in “White Horses.” I prefer these honest, eloquent observations to the puzzling syntax Ruocco sometimes gets into, which hides characters’ emotional outbursts.

As a writer of short fiction, people often ask me whether flash fiction invites a wider, shorter attention-spanned reading audience in and I can’t say that it does. Nor can I say that micro prose benefits from the pop entertainment appeal of tiny, paragraph-long chapters despite the best hopes of experimental writers with an eye on a wider readership. But as with any narrative form, an idea or a story sometimes calls for brevity and the structures of both of these books validate the short forms of the pieces inside, each of them offers a quick-flow, highly rewarding, whirlwind read.

^{Buy A Common Pornography from Powells}  

^{Man's Companions at Tarpaulin Sky}

^{Sampsell's Future Tense Press}

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