Shelley Jackson is writing a story by tattooing one word at a time on a person. The story is a “sequence of words tattooed on the bodies of some 2,093 volunteers, several of whom are reported to have teamed up to form whole sentences. Jackson’s ‘story’, by the way, is called Skin. Who said the avant-garde was dead? At 2,093 words, her ‘story’ might possibly persuade the subeditors among us to institute a search for cuts. It certainly does invite us to ask another basic question, viz: how short can a story be, and still be considered a story?”