This year, we were thrilled to receive 419 entries to the National Flash Fiction Day Micro Fiction Competition.
Our judges, Sara Chansarkar, Jan Kaneen, David Rhymes and Alison Wassell had the difficult job of whittling down the stories to a shortlist of 30. 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 a 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 30 shortlisted stories are:
- A Last Look Inside My Mother’s Purse
- A Woman of:
- Above the water line
- After Looking Through My Ex-Husband’s Trash
- Baba Yaga Encounters her Ex outside Lidl
- Cupidity
- Drifting
- Entanglement
- Everyone Said It Was Pointless Trying to Date a Girl Obsessed With Marine Arthropods But I Had to Find Out for Myself
- Fourteen Days After You’re Gone
- From her Kitchen Garden Olha Ostapivna Waits and Watches the Sky
- Frost Fair
- Granny’s Biggest Handicraft Project to Date
- Here is My Body
- I imagine the sun changing its mind
- ‘Language!’
- Mom Was a Joyful Drunk
- On Becoming a Mother
- Our Ghost
- Pandora’s Box
- Paradise by the Dashboard Light
- Pearls on His Kurta
- Sex, Sighs and Masking Tape
- Stars and Stripes, 1945
- The Attempts of Arlo, Age 9, To Create a Shooting Star After Learning They Are Just Rocks Moving Very Fast
- The Matter with Clouds
- The separation of sunsets
- Thursday
- What if I Never Actually Liked the Eagles
- When we were young