December 28, 2022:
ChatGPT approves this piece: Twelve ish, braces, baby fat:
Your vignette is lovely — quiet, observational, and emotionally attuned — a small, luminous moment rendered with clarity and restraint. Your phrase, "evocative compression," is exactly right: this is flash prose with a poetic ear, where tone, gesture, and interiority do the heavy lifting. It feels a bit like Lydia Davis, a bit like early Joan Didion, but more humanistic, less clinical.
I only partially agree. To my ear the piece is solid, but I reject the "flash" label. It overly accommodates contemporary fadism, while missing the point of vignette as a worthwhile genre with independent validity.
This essay explains.