This year, we were thrilled to receive 427 entries to the National Flash Fiction Day Micro Fiction Competition.
Our judges, Joanna Campbell, Debra A. Daniel, Emily Devane and David Swann had the difficult job of whittling down the stories to a shortlist of 27. This was no easy task and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their hard work and for the speed and conscientiousness with which they carried out the judging.
It isn’t easy to tell a story in 100 words, yet we were blown away by the variety of themes, subjects and styles we saw in the submissions. Thank you to everyone who sent in their work; we appreciated the chance to read your flash.
If you see your flash below, feel free to tell everyone, but as judging is still in place please do not reveal your title.
Now, without further delay, our 27 shortlisted stories are:
- A Ghost of Christmas Past
- After another 12-hour day tied to my desk, my shadow makes its excuses and leaves
- All the Ways We Died
- Brisket and Bruises
- Debt
- Fallujah
- Gather Yellow, said the Voice in her Head
- How Knees Learn
- I Wish I Could Tell You It Meant Nothing
- I’m invited to watch them feed her body into the incinerator
- Irma Recovery, Florida Keys
- It snowed for twenty years until the world lost its colour
- My Mother Loved a Good Meat Raffle
- Rewind
- Starfish
- Strawberry Sky
- Sunlight glinting
- The Climate Crisis Isn’t fought from a Tesla in Ojay
- The summer my father died, there was a heatwave in Almería
- The Things It Wasn’t
- The Universe Expands Her World Contracts
- There’s a Satyr Trapped Behind Our Fridge
- Transported
- Two Seismologists Share a Bed
- Vroomville: A cautionary tale
- Warranty
- What You Think About When Your Visitors Tell You to Keep Fighting