The 2021 National Flash Fiction Day Microfiction Competition was judged by:
- Rachael Dunlop
- K M Elkes
- Sharon Telfer
- Alison Woodhouse
The winning and highly commended stories can be read below and will appear in the 2021 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology.
FIRST PRIZE
Tea Time
by Susan James
Ours was a yard. Theirs was a garden. It’s how you knew the difference: who was who. We drank pop. They had soft drinks. Our tea was their dinner. Our mams. Their mums. Only, we all scrapped alike.
Years later, I married one of them. Mrs so-and-so, so I was. Invited Mam over for tea: loose leaf steeped in a teapot. Her gaze rolling from unlit oven to unlaid table. Only when she shrugged into her coat did I hear the growl in her belly, and my shame come colder than ever my backside had been in her outside lavatory.
SECOND PRIZE
Last Supper
by Faye Brinsmead
Aperitivi
As our martinis arrive, walls melt and windows shiver. The waiter, bending to stabilise the table, yelps, sucks his crab-bitten finger. We kick off our shoes, interlace sandy toes. Seagulls seize pimento-stuffed green olives.
Primi
Water froths our ankles. We fork-twirl spaghetti alle vongole, murmuring Venice, Florence. Yes, we’ve lived.
Secondi
The sun sinks, melon-pink, into your friulano. Too late to broach the obvious. Rising seas, drowned towns. I stroke your kelp-draped knees. How’s the calamari?
Dolce
The table’s afloat. We savour semifreddo, scan the blurring shore. Not daring to face the onyx monster-wave cresting behind us.
THIRD PRIZE
Amalgamation
by Johanna Robinson
The honeymoon couple attend a glassmaking-and-history workshop – conducted in Italian, which they don’t speak. Still, they enjoy the flow of the words, the rhythm, the roar of the stove. They hear the difference between chink of iron and the chink of glass. They appreciate the craft and the optimism and the inevitable breakage, the ratio of success to sacrifice. And they understand the price, because that doesn’t need translating. They watch carefully, separately: the melting, shaping, hardening, cracking. In the shop, they buy a family of marbles, not easily breakable, easily divided.
HIGHLY COMMENDED (in alphabetical order)
Adverb
by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
I shouldn’t use adverbs but how do I describe the way the phone slid from my hands, the way I lifted the covers, the way I slumped in the bathroom, the way I poured wheat flour into a mixing bowl, the way my knuckles kneaded the dough, the way my fingers rolled out discs, the way the flame puffed them up, the way I counted out a hundred kidney beans, the way I recited the kalimah on each legume, the way my hands declined the video call I expected before she was taken for burial, without using “slowly.”
The Burning Boy
by Sam Payne
We don't mention the time in chemistry when he sprayed Lynx on his palm and held it above the blue flame of the Bunsen burner. Or the time in the park when we set fire to dry sticks and he walked barefoot through the flames without flinching. We don't talk about syphoning petrol from his father's truck or how we convinced him it was the last initiation. And in assembly, when the headmaster proclaims misadventure and unforeseen tragedy, we don't tell anyone how that boy had been burning for months. How we did nothing to douse the flames.
A Cyclist
by Anne Howkins
A cyclist freewheeling. A cyclist; freewheeling along a mountain road. A cyclist, head down; a mountain clinging to the road, sheer above, sheer below. A cyclist, his wife’s voice slipping into his head, freewheeling the sheer mountainside; tyres scattering gravel across the pitted tarmac. A cyclist, his wife’s sheer anger spinning inside his head; freewheeling along pitted tarmac sandwiching a ribbon of moss, gravel flying into the void. A cyclist, legs spinning pistons, his wife’s anger freewheeling along a mountain road; a tyre slipping on the mossy gravelled ribbon.
A cyclist’s wheels spinning.
A cyclist flying free.
The Doll Hospital
by Rosie Garland
Your doll doesn’t cry when she’s thrown down the stairs. She kidnaps your brother’s Action Man and steals his gun.
You cut her hair, bite her nails to the wrist, snap her arm so it matches yours. Mother says she must be sent away for fixing.
After twelve days, seven hours, sixteen minutes she returns with a perfect body, dressed in pastel frill. How can you trust her, now she speaks with your mother’s voice? However hard you stuff her to the back of a drawer, you hear whispering.
Don’t bother telling. No-one will believe you.
Long Twilight
By Tracey Weller
We knitted stories together from unravelled wool, taken from garments worn by our younger selves. I realised she was struggling to clothe herself, when her stories sagged from dropped stitches and unwound yarns lay brambled on the floor.
I tried to dress us both.
When the threads grew scarce, I knotted my fingers into her jumper holes.
Netted, we held each other in the dark and in that first long night the darning stitches of my finger bones held true. Grey morning came and I counted the holes in my sister’s clothes, not telling her how much they grew.
Sirens
By Caoimhín de Paor
When the net came aboard they found the bodies tangled in the mesh, like angels in a christmas tree, he thought. Whatever they were, they had been dead for some time. Reduced to their skeletal frames, adorned with barnacles, periwinkle shells, and crowns of seaweed. Human in almost every regard, except for their tapering fins. The fishermen cut them loose from the mesh and lay them out on the deck one at a time. Soon thereafter they began to weep, hearing soft lilting notes on the breeze. The echo of a distant and long forgotten song.
Summer Breeze
by Paul Dicken
Jock was telling me about the chimneys, and how they all lean towards the south. The mortar dries out in the heat you see, then it desiccates and contracts, and as the stonework gently ages it eases towards the light. I could never see it myself.
We were sitting on the scaffolding dangling dirty workboots in the air, while telephones droned unanswered through shaded office windows. And Jock told me about the Falklands, and carving tombstones on the side; and then he laughed and sipped his coffee, and we looked out over the rooftops towards the Abbey in the south.