For one thing, who decided what should be the length of a short story to be called that? If I remember my literary history correctly, none did except maybe some intellectually not so well off Editors who thought that we better call these shorter stories "Flash fiction" or something like that and then refuse to pay the same honorarium for the longer ones. Otherwise how can size matter when telling a tale?

Or is it linked to something like, "I have paid a lot of money to buy this magazine to read a story and that must be long enough to look like my money lasted longer than the time I took to go and buy it in the first place." Pretty silly at every level.

The tyranny of length

I know in which sector size matters most as per popular belief but it actually doesn't, skill does in case you are interested to know. But to apply the size theory and the reported inadequacy to literature as well seems seriously misplaced. To put it more crudely, those who think stories to qualify as one, must of a certain length must be truly a companion to a lovable term I will not mention.

Do the above qualify as a theory? Probably not but then the idea that a story to be judged fiction by length doesn't make much sense either.

What Wikipedia says

It seems the "masters of words' haven't yet agreed entirely on what to call them. Read the words pasted below.

"...fictional narrative that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story;[2] the 280-character story (also known as "twitterature");[3] the "dribble" (also known as the "minisaga", 50 words);[2] the "drabble" (also known as "microfiction", 100 words);[2] "sudden fiction" (750 words);[4] "flash fiction" (1,000 words); and "microstory".[5] "

But the long story is the Brahmin so. "Some commentators have suggested that flash fiction possesses a unique literary quality in its ability to hint at or imply a larger story." I mean anything that is not long as per their gospel is just a "hint" not a full story.

More history

As expected, there are lots of stories and theories and so on. It's obvious that some stories would be longer and some shorter but then so what. For example, Aesop's Fables Panchatantra and Jataka stories or Nasreddin Hoja etc were not too long as everyone knew patience is not necessarily a universal virtue as some would like to believe.

Later on we hear about its resurgence in the 19th century and many magazines came up displaying the shorter ones. I mean people were not that dumb that they would fail to realize that no one wants to spend 13 hours out of the allotted 24 in reading a simple tale which is boring.

However, there is such a thing as the market where stories are sold for various reading segments and patience and a niche readership grows. In 1992, the term "flash fiction" was officially used for a collection of stories. It came into use with the term coined by James Thomas who with Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka edited the 1992 anthology.

A few authors

The list of authors doing "flash" fiction is never ending. This includes Sadi of Persia, Anton Chekhov, O. Henry, Franz Kafka, Kawabata, Ernest Hemingway to just start breathing. Hemingway wrote 18 of these apparently that were in his first collection, In Our Time (1925). He is of course the writer of the most well-known one that goes this way, "For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn".

In Bangladesh

Do people write such short stuff in Bangladesh? Yes, many do but they are not considered mainstream. They go by different names and are considered a literary shudro of sorts. They are not full stories which basically size matters. In a way the content is minimized, treatment is off loaded and impact on readers is a minor matter.

The problem is that no specialized magazines exist on publishing such content and most literature Editors of the dailies are not keen. For them size really matters as they have to fill up pages so. There are only a few like Alim Ajiz of the Easel supplement of The Business Standard and Razu Alauddin of BDnews24 who promote them but the bigger boys and girls on the ranch prefer large sized fishes.

Recently ikram Kabir has published a collection of such stories and he has called it "khude golpo" or little stories, tiny stories etc. In other words he is niche-ing himself knowing that the audience likes to think that they are a new genre. The stories are great but declared as not really mainstream.

So the battle goes on. With digital content over running all others and the audience taste shifting, it's time to ask if the longer version will survive at all or not. Both should but the insistence that size determines category is rather silly and has weakened Bangladeshi fiction already not so strong.

So here is my contribution. The title of the story is "Full stop". Done.