Flash (or fake) Fiction?

What is a story?

What makes a piece of writing something that stirs you and churns you and spits you out, but you're happy for the experience and would do it again?

Maybe it's length. Write a certain number of words, a certain number of pages, and you've got a story on your hands. But that can't be right, because then any rambling could be a story, which doesn't reserve enough status for those truly inspired and inspiring pieces. Besides, there is now not only the novel, the novella, the novelette, and the short story, but there are even smaller forms like flash fiction, microfiction, dribble, drabble, and hint fiction. It's a bunch of terms, I know, and there's no one set definition between these the shorter forms. Suffice it to say that, as a catch-all phrase, flash fiction can be anywhere from a 6 word story to an 2,500 word vignette.

"For sale, baby shoes, never worn." Is that a story? Careful with your answer; that sentence has been attributed to Ernest Hemingway. But even great writers can make mistakes. They can overextend or overestimate their abilities. Is this what Hemingway was doing?

I believe that for anything to count as story, it must have a character interacting, whether by action or  reaction, with an object, which may be another person, a world, an idea, a situation, or more. Typically for novels, there is emphasis on character change or development, but I have removed it from the list of necessities because, since flash fiction is shorter, I think it can only show that a character has the potential to change. In this way then, for story to be story, it must present character interaction and character potential; dependent on the form is the fact of whether or not character potential must be taken to actuality.

So now it's your turn to judge. What really makes a story? To make your job easier, to move you from the abstract to the concrete, what about these?

           -(no title)

                Fighting with what she could, crying, she struck him just as hard. (12 words)

          -America the better

                He looked at him incredulous and asked, "Do I look like the kind of man who, if I had a doughnut, would still have a doughnut?" (26 words)

         -Trade

                The wind slapped her face and the desire reared within her, to take the wild horses and strap them down, hurt them with her whips, and make herself as wild as the temper she would work out of them. (39 words)

So, what's your call?