Microfictions - Kafka Face/Off

It's Murphy vs Kafka in the battle of the microfictions

Aug 16, 2024

So as a jolly way of enjoying today’s collection of my microdosed fictions from

and THE FICTION DEALER, I’ve mixed in my own stories with a selection of Franz Kafka’s own microfictions.

Here’s the game: as you read, guess which ones come from the M and which come from the K. Answers at the end. Hint – if it seems transcendent and mysterious beyond words, it’s probably Mister K.

GRIME

Demiurge Urizen was tasked with making the material universe.

He looked around at the materials left to work with after the containing cosmos was completed: foul-smelling ooze, cosmic slop, and a quantum substrate of grimy uncertainty.

Was he then an evil creator? No, just not really up to his job.

HOME

Unlock the apartment door, slip inside. Nobody sees, nobody to make smalltalk with about the weather or some thing somewhere. Unseen, unbothered.

Cool inside, not cool enough. Still clammy heat clinging, fuggy soup of closed air.

Move into the kitchen. Air fresher. Open up my chest.

Open the freezer compartment. There it is, frozen.

Home is where the heart is.

VULTURE

A vulture was hacking at me. It had already torn my boots to shreds, now it was hacking at the feet themselves.

A man passed by and asked me why I suffered this. “One shot and that’s the end of him,” said the man “I’ve only got to go home and get my gun.”

During this conversation the vulture had been calmly listening; now I realized that it understood everything. It took wing and then, like a javelin thrower, thrust its beak through my mouth, deep into me.

Falling back, I was relieved to feel him drowning in my blood.

MOUSE

“The world is getting smaller every day,” said the mouse. “At first it was so big and scary. I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to right and left. But these walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

“You need only to change direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

DOOR

In an enormous room, people sit huddled in rows. Guards march up and down, keeping the rows orderly.

Many doors lead in, but only one door in the far wall leads out.

An official points at me. My turn. I hug my family. Guards pull me off, prod me to walk.

It's dark and cold in the doorway. When I –

DRAGON

He couldn’t understand it. Since he’d settled outside the city, the people had been so rude, and then sometimes they weren’t. They sent some nice ladies to talk to him and he’d tried to make friends, but they got a bit singed and then they were lying there and he was so hungry.

Then one day a man with a red cross came to make friends with him. What fun!

JOURNEY

My grandfather used to say: “Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young person can decide to travel over to the next town without being afraid that even the span of a normal life may fall short of the time needed for such a journey.”

LIGHTHOUSE

King Ptolemy ordered the construction of the Pharos of Alexandria, and it stood 400 feet tall, last Wonder of the World.

A thousand years later, an agent of the Byzantine Emperor, the eunuch Hephasteus, told Caliph Marwan that he knew of secret treasure buried in the foundations of the lighthouse.

The caliph ordered a team of engineers to dig wherever the eunuch indicated.

“Over here”, he said, and they dug here.

“No, there,” he said, and they dug there.

Finally they dug right through the foundations. A small tremor came one day, and the lighthouse toppled, blocking the harbor forever.

HOURGLASS

When they think of me, they think of the black cowl, the scythe, the pale horse I ride. They never remember the hourglass I carry in my left hand.

There are billions of these hourglasses. One for each of you.

Who can count the sands of time? Me. I can.

WINDOW

Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against it..

The sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her. At the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her.

And then the man has passed by and the little girl’s face is quite bright.

SOLUTION

Vulture, Mouse, Journey and Window are Franz Kafka originals, lightly edited by me to fit the microfiction format and modernize the diction.