How Short Can Short Be?

A story doesn't have to be thousands upon thousands of words. A lot can be said with bare bones, leaving all the fill-in-the-blanks up to the reader. Sometimes those kinds of stories are the most haunting.

Need an example? Here's a tale in only two sentences:

"The last man on earth sat alone in a room.

There was a knock on the door."

~ by Fredric Brown

Makes you wonder who--or what--is making the knocking noise, eh? And what happened to all the rest of the people, leaving only one to sit in a room? Nuclear destruction? Some kind of rabid virus to which a single person was immune? Personally, I wonder what the room looked like. I see it with cracked plaster walls, a single light bulb hanging by a frayed wire, a fine layer of dust coating everything--even the man.

Here's an even shorter story by Ernest Hemingway:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

You can't help but wonder why those shoes were never worn. My brain takes an immediate left into sadness by assuming the baby died. But for those of you who are more optimistic, maybe the mama simply hit a hot shoe sale and the lucky baby had so many, the kid merely grew before he could wear them all. Maybe it's none of the above and the parents' income took a nosedive so they had to sell the baby's shoes for the moolah to survive.

See, it's really not that hard to come up with a short story. The trick is in evoking some kind of emotion in the reader. Here's my shot at it...

Thorn. Flesh. Mother.

What questions or mind pictures does this raise? Have at it in the comment section or try your own hand at composing a shortie.