“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” With this six-word story, Ernest Hemingway established a platform for this genre of compressed narrative, which is known as the short-short story, or by the commonly used term in America ‘flash fiction’. The definition of flash fiction genre originally included short-short stories of 750, or up to 1500 words. In the Arabic Literature, the short-short story started to appear in the middle of the twentieth century, with many scholars claiming that this genre can be traced back to Gibran Khalil Gibran in “The Madman” (1918) and “The Wanderer” (1932). In 1944, Tawf?q Yousef leaded the publication of this genre when he published his collection of stories “Al-?Ath?r?”. By the 1960s and the 1970s, this genre gradually expanded its popularity among writers from other Arabic countries, where it was usually published in newspapers, literary magazines such as in “Al-Kilmah” magazine where writers like Shukr? Al-?ayy?r used to publish their short-short stories. The short- short story relies more than most narrative forms on techniques such as allusion, metonymy, synecdoche, symbolism in order to achieve its extraordinary concision of form. The present paper, proposes to analyze post-2000 short-short stories from Kuwait, together with the readers' responses to them. In a survey lab, two segments of audience, one segment shares the same cultural background with the writers and the other is not, 20 participant in maximum, will be asked to fill out a questionnaire asking for their feedback on some of stories of three Kuwaiti writers: Layl? Al-?Uthm?n, Yousef Khalifah, and Ibrah?m Dasht?. The study combines narrative theory and reader response theory to analyze the writer-message-reader matrix as it applies to these Kuwaiti short-short stories. In particular it will examine elements of sarcasm and irony, as these are not so much verbally expressed as subtly suggested, and therefore prone to both "mis"-writing and "mis"-reading, even as they confound the critic. The findings of the study are revolved around four outcomes: to what extent the different cultural backgrounds can affect the writer-reader partnership, could the writer relies on the receiver’s interpretation based on his/her individual point of view, the impact of the reader’s cultural background on his/her expectation for a possible resolution, and finally the main characteristics of the short-short story that can be employed to achieve a better understanding of the hidden sarcasm.