The 2025 National Flash Fiction Day Microfiction Competition was judged by:
- Sudha Balagopal
- Rebecca Field
- James Montgomery
- Sherry Morris
The winning and highly commended stories can be read below and will appear in the 2025 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology. Thank you again to our four judges; their job is always extremely difficult and they carried out the task with great enthusiasm and attention to detail. You can read more about them here.
Congratulations again to all our prize-winning and highly commended authors, and to all those who were shortlisted. And, a big thank you to everyone who entered this year’s competition and trusted us with their stories.
FIRST PLACE
Sarah Freligh
A Civil War
Fourth hour history and we’re passing notes about whether that blue stain on Rita Ceresi’s neck is ink or a hickey instead of listening to Rodney Granger’s boring report about Lee’s surrender at Appomattox when the door opens and a man walks in, somebody’s dad with a bag lunch only the thing in his hand is a gun and Mrs. Keller our teacher is sleepwalking toward him—Please, John—and now, whenever I can’t unremember it, I think of General Grant on the courthouse steps telling his men The war is over, knowing that some wars are never over, ever.
SECOND PLACE
Martha Lane
Too Late for Lullabies
I killed the muffin man, slit his throat as he slept. Humpty, Hickory, Horner too, I burned their houses down. Laboured to keep the smile from my face as shell cracked and skin blistered. Plum pies roasted to fucking cinders.
Bo Peep? Bludgeoned her with a bobbin. Choked Miss Muffet with homemade cottage cheese, strained through unused muslin cloths in pastel shades of powder, rose, and sage. Swaddled in fury I fed McDonald into his combine harvester.
A rocking horse onesie unworn.
Mockingbird blanket refolded.
Nursery rhymes whispered, unheard, in the dark, while Mary’s lamb twitched in the corner.
THIRD PLACE
Dawn Miller
The Last Summer
We hurtle over moats, slink under fences, and tightrope across fallen logs, spongy and blackened. We layer lacey branches against cedar trees to forge walls of our fort far from rule-laden parents and know-it-all siblings.
We are twelve and invincible, shedding the final sunsets of August like there will never be another one like this, and we coil bracelets from bellflowers around our narrow wrists, make crowns from bloodroot and pinecones, the air electric as we whisper secrets and giggle into clamped mouths to hide our fears of boys, of bleeding, of never having friends like this again.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
(in alphabetical order by title)
Tracie Renee
Bible Outtake #1: “A Rabies Scare in West Virginia Turns Out to Be Raccoons Drunk on Fermented Crab Apples”
No locusts, just disoriented raccoons in the crab apples today.
Surely a sign, Pa says. He buries his six-pack in the trash like this time he means it. Ma bakes loaf after loaf of bread for the birds. Brother sneaks Pa’s six-pack out of the trash and into his room.
Me, I get now why God said don’t eat the apples. Hell’s the hot of our yard reeking like hard cider on the breath of the reason I’m two lines on a pregnancy test. I whet the axe, fall the tree, free bread-fat doves to seek new green.
Sarah Oakes
Bubbles
It’s the bubbles that get to me, the ones she loved, the ones that always brought her home, the ones that were like sheep in her head, because this time they can't call her back, and this time they can’t bring her home, and this time they can’t pop under her teeth, yet I blow them all the same, just in case she chases them on that other shore, running wild and free at last, and in that thought I find comfort, as the shimmering bubbles soar.
Ciel Stynes
Caleb
You’ll have to have long hair, Mother said. In plaits. He hated plaits. Skirts, too.
That summer, with his baggy shorts that showed grazed knees, he thought it wouldn’t happen to him.
And then it’s – you’ll be a teenager soon. You’ll have to wear a bra.
If being a teenager meant chest growth, mood swings and a stain in his pants every month, he wanted no part of it.
Where’s my lovely little girl gone? Mother said. Why won’t you talk to someone?
But there was no one to talk to, not back then. And nobody to call him Caleb.
Holly Brandon
Lunch Lady
My angel wears a hairnet; her harp’s a slotted spoon.
“Some of everything, baby?”
I nod.
“Peas?” she asks.
“Yes ma’am.”
Hers is the only smile I see most days, that styrofoam tray the one meal I’m offered.
She slips me packs of saltine crackers. “We had extra.” She winks. I stash them in my backpack, plastic-wrapped godsends when Mama blows our grocery money for “the last time, I swear.”
At night, I stuff empty wrappers under my pillow, dreaming of Monday and what it will bring— warm food, kind smiles, and an angel who calls me baby.
Coleman Bigelow
Us Minus You
When people ask how many siblings I’ve got, sometimes I slip and say three. I remember the original equation. But usually, I can block it out. That game of hide and seek. The way I pretended not to know you’d snuck inside the abandoned fridge. And how I resisted telling Billy, and even our parents, because I knew you’d kill me if I ever gave up your hiding spot. I should have known there was no air. That there was no way for you to let yourself out. But I was only five, and I hadn’t yet learned about subtraction.
Elena Zhang
Why I Threw Up on the Whale Watching Tour
Because the waves tossed my stomach up and down like a fifteen-year marriage. Because the salt spray on my lips tasted like the margarita from that Saturday night. Because my husband threw up first and we had run out of things to say to each other. Because of two faint pink lines. Because my husband didn’t know yet. Because the father didn’t either. Because we didn’t see any whales, but I could still sense their looming presence, just below the surface.
Vijayalakshmi Sridhar
9,125 Days of Sambhar, Because Like Biryani, Sambhar is Also an Emotion
With teeth-squeaking tamarind that triggered your tooth-cavity and my menopausal-sensitivity, or sourness as meek as a kitten, reckless quantities of chilli powder that was store-bought though I had homemade-stock of sambhar powder, an overload of tadka of mustard, methi seeds, and channa dhal – because your glutton-loving dad favoured it and you didn’t and since you criticized the excess unnecessarily-publicly, miniscule-tadka that needed a microscope and deep-dives for access, oil bordering the fringes, the colour matching the several centuries-old temple-pond at sunset – you and I in it like two canoes with twenty-six years of couple-baggage, touching, drifting apart, touching, drifting apart.