[stylist] The Shortest Short Story

[Vejas Vasiliauskas]

Hi All,
As many of you may know, the shortest short story ever was composed by Ernest Hemingway. It was only 6 words. These words were "for sale, baby shoes, never worn." In my English class today, we spent about 20 minutes discussing it.
Before, I had kind of  drawn the conclusion that a woman had brought baby shoes, then had either a miscarriage or stillbirth and decided she needed to sell the shoes. This was the first possibility but then we discussed many other possible scenarios:
The family might have had good money, but had to sell their shoes because they couldn't bear them being there, because it would remind them of the loss.
The family could have had lots of money, and might have had too many shoes.
They could have simply just brought a size that was too big/small.
Someone even suggested that maybe during the 1950's, which was around the time this was written, and abortions were still taboo, it could have been a pair of shoes gifted to a family who were going to abort their baby.
Our class also discussed why this is considered a short story, since the usual character development, setting, and plot aren't there. We came to the conclusion that Hemingway might have wanted us to draw conclusions for ourselves. We also decided that the main character  had to be someone who could write, since they wrote the advertisement, and that it would be most likely taking place in a country like the US or UK, and not in a country such as China where they wouldn't be so open about having a baby.
I just found this  to be an extremely interesting discussion in my class. Has anyone else had different conclusions or discussed it differently?
Vejas