Book Review: Just Outside the Tunnel of Love

Walter Martin

Just Outside the Tunnel of Love by Francine Witte, Blue Light Press, 2023

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

To say I know what makes good flash fiction would be a lie. I have no sheet of metrics, no firm rules. One of the Internet’s most popular literary forms, flash fiction appears to have the economy of poetry, the weight of each line, but also narrative leaps reminiscent of novels. Flash fiction does less than the longer short story in terms of space but, given the right writer, infinitely more in that space. So yes, flash fiction writers are poets and novelists in one. Or something like that. Most of all, when you come across a master of the form, they are like magicians, pulling a full-grown, trembling rabbit from a page, half a page. This is all a long-winded way of saying I was instantly entranced by trampset contributor Francine Witte’s flash fiction collection Just Outside the Tunnel of Love.

Witte is one such master of the form, it is clear upon reading. The book offers more than 40 amusing and heartbreaking gems, each polished to a delicious sheen without being forced or stuffy. Compression marks these stories, it is true, but so does a certain cheekiness/breeziness/absurdism that is downright contagious. From sentence to sentence, Witte is deft, daft, punchy and nimble.

The stories revolve around love and the failure of love, of course.

“Meanwhile, the thirst for everything is draping the room like sunlight,” reads a passage in “Clean Magic.” In short, a lover steals a man’s legs. She has a magic rock that glows “like a woman in love.” The rock itself is narrated by a spirit trapped inside it, “mistaking its hardness for truth.” The flash is split into three shorter parts, each weirdly complementing the other in “its own measured way, like time and dying and love.”

In “Perfect,” a woman meets her deceased partner in a dream, where he is far more perfect than he was in life, “his tongue gone empty of lies.” The woman considers suicide in an ironic, matter-of-fact way — irony evident in many stories — but can’t resist the man now perfect in death. The dream is beautiful and nostalgic: “The jab and snag of the rocks and the two of them going naked and in love.”

Love is a wilderness in this collection. Cheating, divorce, and broken families form many plots. Potatoes and pumpkins stand in for companions. Some of the stories have meta elements, narrators self-consciously crawling into themselves or smashing narrative pieces together rather flippantly. Reading Witte reminded me of other trampset contributors out there mining domestic darkness: Cathy Ulrich, Amy Barnes, Sarah Freligh, and Rick White, to name a few. What these writers discover in the unmasking of cliched life is, if not tenderness itself, some softened spot of human connection. “Not-Myrtle,” another beauty from Witte, lands on such a spot: “and when I finally saw your eyes looking straight at me, I could see a half a dozen alligator bites already in them, and I’m thinking that maybe it might be okay to try to put together all our chewed-up parts, you and me, and see if they form one pretty good thing.”