And so we condescend when we read it, don't quite take it seriously, which may be in part
why good flash fiction is constantly so surprising, so startling, so likely to give us our comeuppance.
The question of what makes the story «matter» is perhaps
best described as the «dramatic imperative,» defined in Randall Brown's A Pocket Guide to
Flash Fiction as «the reason for a story's existence, the
why of its being, of this moment's being chosen over all the others.»