"A Very Short Repine Regarding Me and My Father" by Adam Falik / Tahoma Literary Review
- Short Story Shoutout
- May 4
- 4 min read
"I've been carrying this scream all my life."
The more I read, the more I realize how important it is for writers to play with form.
I’ve made reference in these columns to the saturation of story telling in popular culture, about how we’ve become so accustomed to tropes and cliché that we sometimes accept them as set-in-stone features of a story. There are more writing guides than are countable that break out immutable genre laws (“when writing a romance, these beats are required; the “meet cute,” the “inkling of desire,” the “point of no return,” etc.)
Increasingly the thrill of surprise is what captures my attention. I thought I was reading a romance, but suddenly it’s a murder mystery. This sci-fi piece is modeled on a classic western. Wait, is this the hero or the villain?
Once you’re gut punched by a break in form, you read a story differently. Suddenly your antenna is up, you’re off auto-pilot. You put a lot more attention into the text. You’re fully engaged. And a fully engaged reader is a happy reader.
It wasn’t long before Adam Falik’s “A Very Short Repine Regarding Me and My Father” (800 words) in Tahoma Literary Review, had me sitting up in my chair.
The opening paragraph is a challenge. The opening line: “For days my father howled in pain from his hospital bed,” is not an invitation. It’s the opposite. Cancer is mentioned a few lines later. As literary tropes go, I prepared myself for a family dealing with catastrophe, for confession and acceptance, for tears and hugs, for reconciliation. I almost didn’t, couldn’t, go with it. But at 800 words total I kept reading, got to paragraph two, and this:
“It did nothing for me to see him and his wife so rattled. I expected to take pleasure in their indignity.”
Yikes.
And the hook was set. What kind of monster is the narrator? What has the father done to invoke this kind of disdain? Where are we headed here?
We meet the father’s wife—from a second marriage, after divorcing the narrator’s mother. The new wife is cruel. She’s instrumental in the father cutting himself off from nearly his entire family. We get a description, in broad brush-strokes, of a disastrous dinner at the father’s home with his wife, the son, and his bride-to-be. Fuel for the fire.
And the fire rages. Falik chooses to stay in summary versus bringing us into scene, at the family dinner, at the father’s deathbed. Along with the story’s length, this is a wise choice. Summary is a fireplace screen that protects us from the sparks shooting off this kerosene-soaked lumber.
At this point, the story doesn’t feel like fiction, although it is clearly labeled that. It feels like memoir. It feels like confession. But will it be? It has to get to confession, to reconciliation, right? That’s not a trope, that’s a mental health imperative.
It doesn’t go there.
“All I wanted was to tell my father that nothing was forgiven.”
We’re approaching horror, or fantasy, depending on the reader’s experience with family. There is no denying the raw power of this doubling down. Horror allows us to peek into terrible possible realities from the safety of the reading chair, the theater seat. Fantasy allows us to scream at our father, too, to get a taste of it. Both allow us to come out the other side liberated. There are any number of possible endings, we can tell ourselves, rightly.
Then further along: “It really is crap how relentless the presence a parent lodges in our consciousness, especially […] if that presence is an absence.”
Falik aligns absence neatly with the idea of an “abscess with a slowly souring stench.”
Then he goes in for the kill. He triples down. Go there, if you can.
Horror? Fantasy? Cautionary tale? Pick your own adventure. At the very least, the whole of this short, short story burns off cliché.
Tahoma Literary Review “is published twice a year.” They “aim to produce an independent literary magazine that sustains writers, poets, editors and everyone involved in the creative process.” All of their selections “are original, previously unpublished content from the submissions queue.” TLR pays its contributors and support staff ($55 per flash piece, up to 1,100 words, and $0.05 / word for prose between 1,100 and 6,000 words).
My timing is terrible—TLR’s spring submission window closes TOMORROW (April 30th). They make daring choices (see above, along with other fiction pieces from their latest issue), so jump in if you’re feeling a kinship!
August to October is traditionally their next submission window.
Read more about Adam Falik’s wide-ranging work at his website.
Many thanks to Adam Falik and Tahoma Literary Review for presenting us with bold, explosive work in “A Very Short Repine Regarding Me and My Father.”
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