Crocodile Smiles: Short Shrift Fictions

Crocodile Smiles is Tarnawsky's collection of what he called short shrift fictions: compressed, absurdist, lit as if on a bright stage. The title asks whether a crocodile can smile if it cannot cry, and the stories proceed in that register.

The cast runs to a barber attached to a pair of scissors that will not stop and an adulteress who bludgeons her husband to death, each figure shown in a hard flat light with the explanation withheld. The stories make their case by leaving out what a longer story would have explained.

This is the short-form companion to the longer mininovels of his Placebo Effect Trilogy, the compressed-fiction project he spent decades refining. Crocodile Smiles is where the compression goes furthest: the bright stage, the figure cut off mid-gesture, the explanation never arriving. Read in order, the collection is a tour through the procedure his career circles back to.