“Sorry Hughie, he said. And then ducked the young man below the surface.”
So-called “flash-fiction” is a very popular form at the moment. The problem is, most people writing it don’t really have the skill to do it well. If you’re a writer and you want to learn, there’s only one author you have to look to and that’s James Kelman. He is the master of telling the story of a life, or a dozen lives, in a single breath. ‘Acid’ is a prime example.
The story depicts an industrial accident, a young man falling in a vat of acid in a factory. The other men stand around him, horrified, but one of the braver of them, the young man’s father in fact, pushes him down under the surface with a pole. This act of apparent cruelty is explained neatly as Kelman tells us what we already know deep down; that the acid has eaten the boy’s body away and that he is, in fact, already dead.
The symbolism of manual work eating away at the bodies here is clear, especially from an author like Kelman who has spent so much of his life campaigning for the rights of those harmed and killed by asbestos, but so is the strangely touching moment of a father helping his son pass in dignity. I’ve read the story dozens of times and it amazes me every time I do.
First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983
A Personal Anthology 