I dislike the idea of flash as just a shorter, short story beholden to all the rules & constraints of short stories. In that case, it becomes a trick of compression alone, a hurried up, stunted short story that caters to declining attention spans. If you write flash, is that what you're aiming for?
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I may be delusional, but I have told myself for years that flash fiction can function as a basic unit of fiction. Which is not to say you can just yank 500 words out of a short story to make a flash.
I’m also a rock collector so…
And operacake? is that the one with a gazillion thin layers of intense deliciousness?
Operacake - that's it exactly - all those layers. To explain in more "normal" terms, my description of pure flash is SHORT-MOVEMENT-LAYERS-BIGGER ON THE INSIDE-EMOTIONALLY POWERFUL-TONAL QUALITY-TAKES RISK
I see and write flash fiction as snapshots, often more like poems, rather than 'complete' stories with a traditional structure.
And my current poetry leans more into that flash style, too. 🤷♂️
I've tried drabble (100 words) the short story equivalent of haiku. It's hard!
A key characteristic of flash is that it tells a much larger story than what's on the page: precise wording hinting at truths behind the veil of omission