We are told we live in a brief world. Our diminishing attention spans underwrite this as we click and click, birds between bushes, the brain between buzzes. Some days it’s all in flux, and we know we live only briefly—brightly, lightly—and disappear. Other days it feels like this is fixed, like we could be here in infinity. Both of these perceptions are fictions. We’re here is what we know. So: the challenge of the short is to embody something wholly, briefly, to deliver the reader a series of surprising pleasures that feels complete, is itself an experience. You have to have an idea, but the idea cannot dominate. Narrative is appealing: it draws our eyes so easily. Narrative is appalling: it’s so often boring once we’re inside the humming thing; we’re so easily lulled to slumber. Besides, there’s rarely enough scope in a short to run on narrative alone. So: if we start with narrative, we might find another fuel to run the engine into orbit once we’ve got it started. “The Compartment” finds this other way, offers us a situation, but then proceeds by sidesteps, goes lyric, linguistic, and soon we’re unsure of where we are, where here is, where there was. In so doing it finds the line between compression and expansion and blows it up, if only for a minute, and fashions itself a little now. I don’t know what bit of it—this all, this ball, this everything—will persist. Will it be this?