The New Yorker Flash Fiction:

This is the fifth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.

By Weike Wang

Right thinks we are a good person. Left does not. Left has the language box, the reason, and the wherewithal to accomplish just about anything, good or bad. Right can draw a little, can sing a little, keeps poor time. When asked where the soul lives, Right says, Everywhere, in every molecule of every cell, and in every version of that cell in every universe. Left says, On the corpus callosum, that massive highway of three hundred million axons, in a tiny wood hut, on the verge of collapse. Left is sedentary. Right frolics—forward, backward, sideways, in a spiral or a zigzag, going nowhere. Right likes this maze to nowhere. Left wants, desperately, to find a way out. There are several possible exits, Right says, and Left replies, No, there is only one, and you must go through the Minotaur’s lair. But how do you know this maze has a Minotaur? Right asks. It could have zero Minotaurs but many dragons, five bridge trolls, seven fairy monsters, two guinea pigs, and, at its very center, our dear mother. But all those things are our dear mother, Left says, and Right says, Literary analysis is boring—why must you always analyze, why not let things be?, and Left says, Because it’s plain fact that, per Freud, you have conjured up and splintered off our mother, as Snow White did with her father—Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Doc, the seven manageable dwarfs of father—and it’s plain fact that you have reduced our mother to an allegorical amalgam (minus the guinea pigs), irreconcilable and circuitous, and it’s plain fact that you’ve positioned her at the paradoxical center, to denote both our origin and our end. For all these reasons, Left does not think that we are a good person. For, if we can do that to our own mother, then what can we do to other people? Right doesn’t think much about other people. Couldn’t care less. But of vital importance to Right is that the maze be free of dwarfs, and Left concurs, as it would be near-impossible to divide our mother up into seven canonical traits. That would require an army of dwarfs, Right jokes, and Left shudders. An army is much less manageable than one person, and soon the maze will be overrun with dwarfish culture and depleted of resources.

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