STARS (a 55-word story)


Our desert guide was binding a camel’s legs together.

“Why?” I asked.

“Too much walking. If I don’t tie its legs, it will walk till death.” Said the guide.

“I wish I could tie my thoughts together; maybe I could sleep then.” I said.

“Watching stars ties thoughts together.” Said the guide.

And it did.



Alberico Collina

Under A Lethal Spell


See You in Samarra is a triumph of quality over quantity.

It shows that a good tale need be neither long nor complex to be compelling.

Half way through this brief story, we learn the identity of the narrator.

And this discovery catches us off balance, making the twist in the plot lethal.

And spellbinding.


Alberico Collina


There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to the market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.

Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

*This story was translated from Arabic but the author remains anonymous. It appears however, in Jeffrey Archer’s short story collection To cut a long story short, Somerset Maugham’s play Sheppey and as a preface to John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.
source:http://www.wamathai.com/death-speaks/

Trial by Dinner


One of the most imaginative stories I have ever read is entitled Traps – A Still Possible Story by Friedrich Dürenmatt.

The car of a travelling salesman breaks down, and he ends up having to spend the night in a small rural town, where all hotels are booked because of an agricultural fair.

Someone directs him to the house of a retired judge, who sometimes, if he likes them, lets strangers sleep at his house.

The pensioner takes a look at the salesman and invites him to stay at his house, on condition that he remain for dinner, and that he take part in a role playing game.

That night, a mock trial takes place over a cordon bleu dinner.

The salesman is tricked into revealing an episode in his past, in which he did not behave ethically.

And which may have contributed to the death of his employer.

The prosecution, a retired lawyer, colleague of the host, seizes on this and pins the crime on the salesman, who becomes the unwitting defendant of a hypothetical murder charge.

But the evening takes an ominous turn and what was supposed to be just a game becomes a tragedy.

Dürrenmatt’s skill lies in telling a tale, where, although we are seduced by the logic of the prosecution and the elegance of their case, ultimately, we empathise with the defendant.

We realize, like many of us, he's a victim of his own superficiality.

His only ‘crime’ is to have sought pleasure without thinking about the consequences.

But at this dinner he is made to stand trial for it.

And this throws a completely different perspective on the whole affair, blowing it up out of all proportions, forcing him to reevaluate his entire life and its worth.

And this will prove deadly.


Alberico Collina

Counting The Ones We Don't See


Some years ago, I remember reading about how workers disinfesting buildings used a table, which showed the visibility ratio of various pests. For cockroaches, for example, the visibility ratio was 1 to 5. This meant that, for every cockroach you saw, there were another five you couldn’t see. These visibility ratios are functional because they allow operators to assess the entity of a problem quickly, and hence calculate what they need to solve it.

What if we introduced official visibility ratios for other things?

Wouldn't they seriously simplify our lives?

Imagine a candidate-preference visibility ratio of 1 to 7. For every person who says that they will vote for candidate John Doe, there are seven, who will vote for him but won’t say so. One could have visibility ratios for each state and each candidate. Voting polls would be more precise.

What about visibility ratios for crime? For every murderer/rapist/robber/fraudster caught we could have an estimate of how many were still on the loose, so as to employ our limited law and order resources accordingly. The safety of each neighbourhood would be more transparent.

And what about using visibility ratios at work? For every customer who says he is satisfied /dissatisfied we could work out the total number of satisfied/dissatisfied customers by applying the appropriate visibility ratio. It would avoid underestimating the good news and overestimating the bad.

The problem is that if we started to use visibility tables, the picture we have of our world would change dramatically. How? Infidelity figures would soar, church attendance would plummet, and estimates of the size of the Black Economy would grow exponentially.

And maybe it wouldn't be necessary. We all carry an infinite number of visibility tables in our head already. For every whisky we see uncle Fred drinking, we reason he had another three on the sly. For every receipt we don't receive from our local shopkeeper, we guess there are another ten she "forgot" to hand out. And these ratios will change as we notice uncle Fred becoming healthier and the shopkeeper more honest. Our visibility ratios rise and fall like tides. And like tides, we keep track of them for fear of getting stranded.

In a sense, this is part of what differentiates us; we differ in our visibility tables and their ratios.

Some of us are optimists, some of us are pessimists, and some of us simply don’t have a clue.

But we nearly all have a visibility ratio for almost everything.

That’s why we take the news with a fistful of salt.

That’s why we don’t believe everything we see, hear, or read.

That’s why we survive - we learn by the things we see and by those we don't.


Alberico Collina

The Three Rules of Letter Writing


Letter writing was on Sunday; each and every Sunday.

Hundreds of children holding biros, perched on benches, on either side of long, uneven tables. Their grey and brown uniforms touching at the elbows.

They sit in a high-beamed hall lined with wood.

The tables, benches, floorboards, wall panels, and ceiling are all made of aged, polished oak.

The smell of wax polish is a pungent cocktail of beeswax and turpentine.

The wood is alive.

It creaks, groans, and snaps with changes in temperature and humidity.

Its moans are welcomed interruptions to a deafening, drowning silence.

The hall is a trusty galleon defying gales in the winter, and a giant coffin with windows in the summer.

An overweight, bespectacled supervisor sits at a lonely desk, in the middle of the hall.

He stands and recites the Three Rules of Letter Writing in a loud, steady voice, as if introducing a boxing match:

"RULE NUMBER ONE: you will write your letters in ENGLISH;

RULE NUMBER TWO: you will make your handwriting LEGIBLE; and

RULE NUMBER THREE: you will NOT SEAL your envelopes."

A few children with the pink tip of their tongue sticking out the side of their mouth, in infantile concentration, begin to write frantically.

Others, hold their pens to their pursed lips and look to the ceiling as if for inspiration.

They will all write a sanitised version of the week’s events to their parents.

In the first term, there had only been two rules: "Write in English" and "Make it legible". Rule three: "You will NOT seal your envelope", was introduced later.

It was adopted because of what happened during the first term.

Some parents received an empty envelope.

Some parents received a blank sheet of paper instead of a letter.

Some parents received another child’s letter.

Some parents received a letter full of insults.

Some parents received letters criticising the school.

No school likes to have parents complaining - it's bad for business, hence, rule number three: "you will NOT SEAL your envelope."

Rule number three made sense.

It surgically removed the magic from letter writing.

But it made sense.



Alberico Collina

Throw Your Steering Wheel Out the Window


Reading Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury, that small masterpiece on principled negotiation, I came across this memorable description of Lock-in tactics:

“This tactic is illustrated by Thomas Schelling's well-known example of two dynamite trucks barreling toward each other on a single-lane road. The question becomes which truck goes off the road to avoid an accident. As the trucks near each other, one driver in full view of the other pulls off his steering wheel and throws it out the window. Seeing this, the other driver has a choice between an explosive crash or driving his truck off the road into a ditch. This is an example of an extreme commitment tactic designed to make it impossible to yield. Paradoxically, you strengthen your bargaining position by weakening your control over the situation.”

Since reading this, I have bought a spare steering wheel, which I keep in the car should the occasion arise. You never know. Anyway, I thought this description couldn’t be beaten until I looked up Thomas Schelling on Wikipedia and came across this surreal illustration:

“In an article celebrating Schelling's Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics,[8] Michael Kinsley, Washington Post op‑ed columnist and one of Shelling's former students, summarizes Shelling's reorientation of game theory thus:

    ‘You're standing at the edge of a cliff, chained by the ankle to someone else. You'll be released, and one of you will get a large prize, as soon as the other gives in. How do you persuade the other guy to give in, when the only method at your disposal – threatening to push him off the cliff – would doom you both?’

    ‘Answer: You start dancing, closer and closer to the edge. That way, you don't have to convince him that you would do something totally irrational: plunge him and yourself off the cliff. You just have to convince him that you are prepared to take a higher risk than he is of accidentally falling off the cliff. If you can do that, you win.’

Why not just shut your eyes and head for the cliff edge, with your arms stretched out before you like a sleepwalker? You know the guy chained to you is going to stop you in time, and when he does, he’ll be screaming “I give in!” to the top of his lungs. It could save a lot of time and grief. But there again, I wouldn’t know. Call me killjoy, but I’m not in the habit of dancing on cliffs, chained to strangers, for prize money. Not yet, at any rate.


Alberico Collina

The Trolley Problem and the Brolly Problem


The Trolley problem, first set by philosopher Philippa Foot, in the late 1960s, goes something like this: you are driving a trolley, and tied to the rail track ahead of you are five people who will die on impact. However, by pulling a lever, you can divert the trolley to another track where an unsuspecting man is working. What do you do? Would you do nothing and send those five people to certain death, or would you pull that lever and decide to take the life of an innocent man? Various versions of this problem have been developed over the years, each with their own peculiar emphasis, but, ultimately, the core of this thought experiment remains the same.

I’d like to propose another, more mundane problem, but one of extreme relevance during these rainy days: The Brolly Problem. It may seem trivial, but it’s a source of much grief among patrons all over the world. The problem may be summarised as follows:

You have gone out to eat and you haven’t taken an umbrella with you, when, just before leaving, you realise a heavy rain has set in. Do you:

a)      steal the nearest one to the exit;
b)      steal the cheapest one;
c)       steal the most expensive one; or
d)      steal the one that is most common;

Each has its own merits because if you choose:
a)      you are less exposed taking the one closer to the exit;
b)      you feel less guilty about stealing something cheap rather than something expensive;
c)       you reason that whoever owns an expensive umbrella may easily afford to replace it; and
d)      by taking the most common umbrella in the rack, the likelihood of getting caught is minimal.

Although the trolley problem is a serious thought experiment and the brolly problem everything but, they both deal with logic, probability, and, ultimately, guilt.

I am not in the habit of stealing umbrellas any more than I am in the habit of killing people on rail tracks. However, I have had my umbrella stolen on several occasions, and I have contemplated murdering the culprit on each occasion. However, I have finally learned my lesson, and I am now the proud owner of the most hideously garish umbrella you can think of.


Alberico Collina

MOTHER JUSTICE (a 55-word story)


Nelido Serpico roamed the streets of Buenos Aires.

With a picture of Octavio, her son, who was shot dead at sixteen, and his killer’s name.

Written on her hands were two numbers: the police case file number and the police’s phone number.

After seven years, she found her son’s killer.

And put him behind bars.




Alberico Collina

THE FIRST SEASON


I hear her lock the shop from inside.

I’m standing in the display window, and with the corner of my eye, I see her hang a “CLOSED” sign on the door.

She ties her hair back with an elastic band she was keeping between her lips.

She walks towards me, wiping her hands on her blue jeans, and whispers, “It’s your turn, Mister.”.

Her slender fingers begin to unbutton my shirt. She has warm hands.

When she pulls off my sleeves, she’s so close I can smell her hair.

One by one, she takes all my clothes off, and puts a “SALE” tag on each.

Tilting her head to one side, she purses her lips while her eyes scan me up and down.

And they linger on my crotch.

She goes to the back of the shop and comes back with a large roll of brown paper.

After measuring a length of it around my waist, she cuts it to size.

She tapes the paper to my midriff like a mini skirt, steps back to look at me, and smiles.

I’ve seen her do it to the others. In a few days, she’ll take the paper off me, and she’ll dress me for the new season.

A mannequin’s life is measured in seasons.

And this was my first.



Alberico Collina

The following are two brief stories both about Truth but very different in content and form.

The first is a 55-word story called The Search by Robert Tompkins included in World’s Shortest Stories Of Love And Death.

It describes the Pyrrhic victory of a man who searches for the truth...and finds it.

The second tale is a Jewish teaching story entitled The Naked Truth.

It is about our need to dress up Truth in story in order to accept it.

These stories are vivid and memorable metaphors of Truth that stay with us long after we've read them. 

They leave a sour aftertaste that gets sweeter until they make you smile.


Alberico Collina


THE SEARCH by Robert Tompkins


Finally, in this remote village, his quest ended.

There, by the fire, sat Truth.

Never had he seen an older, uglier woman.

“Are you Truth?”

The wizened, wrinkled hag nodded.

“What message can I take from you to the world?” he pleaded.

She replied, spitting into the fire. “Tell them I am young and beautiful.”




THE NAKED TRUTH (Old Jewish Teaching Story)

"Truth, naked and cold, had been turned away from every door in the village. Her nakedness frightened the people. When Parable found her she was huddled in a corner, shivering and hungry. Taking pity on her, Parable gathered her up and took her home. There, she dressed Truth in story, warmed her and sent her out again. Clothed in story, Truth knocked again at the doors and was readily welcomed into the villagers’ houses. They invited her to eat at their tables and warm herself by their fires."