February 15 - "One She Once Was"

“One She Once Was”
by Deb Olin Unferth
Minor Robberies (2007)

* * * * (Great) Realistic

A woman worries about the type of person she will become after quitting smoking.

I’m kind of digging these flash fiction stories by Unferth. They’re not so much stories as…well, flashes, but they are insightful, and there is some great word work being thrown down. I sometimes worry that if I quit my entertainment obsession I might become someone totally different. It’s a weird thing to think about the actions or habits that end up defining us, whether we want – or realize – it occurring.

I am huge fan of longer sentences, and enjoyed the following from this story:

“Or perhaps the act of not smoking one day changed her slightly and then not smoking another day changed her slightly again and each day was like that, small change on top of small change, until slowly she became a person who didn’t mind not dating people she didn’t like, for example, and each day she was a different person, if only slightly, until one day she was this, her current self, a nonsmoker, the person she didn’t want to be, which doesn’t seem so bad now, in fact, seems better.”

It is also impressive to find a single sentence summing up the entire story in a few marvelous lines.