by Kristen Skovsgard | Feb 20, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
My uncle showed me a casting from one of his hawks. I asked if it was the same as a pellet, and he said it was, but with hawks you call it a casting. I knew what a pellet was because earlier that year a lady in khakis had come to my classroom and handed out owl pellets for us to dissect with tweezers. She told us about the gizzard and the crop and I asked if I had one. She laughed and said no, because I was a girl, not a bird. I asked my uncle if I had a gizzard. Maybe, he said. Would be a good place to keep all those old bones before you’re through with them. Could get poke-y, though.
That was my first summer with my uncle and his boys at the Bird Ranch. It wasn’t really called the Bird Ranch, there’s no such thing as a Bird Ranch, but at the time that’s all I could think to call it. I said it aloud once and my uncle’s boys laughed. Their names were Joshua and Jonah. My aunt had named them, since she was a proper Christian lady, but Joshua’s middle name was Harley, since she wouldn’t let my uncle have one. She would tolerate the birds, not the bikes.
Back then Joshua had a kestrel. It was a tiny little thing that fluttered miserably on his gloved hand. He always held the jesses too tight. I knew that the kangaroo leather straps around each bird’s legs were called jesses since I had first referred to them as “bird bracelets”, which got me in a lot of trouble with the boys since bracelets were for girls and hawking was for boys. I knew that the jesses were made from kangaroo leather because the first time I heard it I was alarmed that kangaroos could be leathered. But kangaroo leather isn’t made from kangaroos, and now I call jesses bird bracelets on purpose. Mostly when I’m around the boys. They don’t bother me about it anymore.
That summer my uncle showed Joshua how to toss a lure on a string. It was a fickle art, to snap it midair, to whip the string in a widening gyre, to drag it across the ground after a hit in a clumsy imitation of a wounded animal, the lure’s leather wings embedded with the feathers of some unfortunate sparrow. I wasn’t allowed to hold the kestrel, so I sat beside its perch. Together we watched the lure go up and down, up and down.
I know it’s not real, the kestrel said, but I’ll go after it anyways.
My uncle had lots of birds. Some were his, some weren’t. There was always a Harris’ hawk, a kestrel, one or two red-tails. Nothing quite as noble as a peregrine or an eagle, but that summer, he had a moon-faced barn owl he’d taken in for rehabilitation. One day I asked her how she liked her mews and her Astroturf throne. I asked her if she missed the trees.
In a past life, she told me, I looked a lot like you. I was taller, though.
I asked my uncle if I could hold her. He was surprised. Joshua and Jonah hadn’t asked before. She wasn’t like the others, hatched from heat lamps and revolving incubators, soothed with imping needles and antiacids. My uncle called her wily. She had a scream like all of hell was after her, and she told me that it was.
You can hold her, my uncle said, but first you must prepare her food.
My uncle led me into the shed. Earlier that day I’d watched him carefully mend a snapped feather on one of the red-tails. He was pointed and slow as he chose a primary from the box of last year’s moult, dipping the imping needle through its hollow spine. Someday I would stand there alone, imping eagle feathers. That day I watched my uncle remove a defrosted Tupperware container from a cupboard. He popped off the lid and a wet, musty smell filled the shed, like the odour of a formerly beloved stuffed animal left in the rain to mould. He removed two corpses. Chicks, no bigger than my palm, Easter-yellow and limp.
Jonah leaned against the door. Joshua stood a few paces back, the kestrel in his gloved hand.
You don’t have to do this, the kestrel said. It’s gross.
You don’t have to if you don’t want to, my uncle echoed. It’s not pleasant.
I want to, I replied.
My uncle demonstrated. First you remove the head, that’s the hardest, so do it first. Then the legs – they should come off easily. Then you squeeze out the insides. The bodies are small, so there’s not much inside. He handed me a chick. It was cool and damp and its head lolled gently against my thumb. Jonah mimed vomiting. Joshua took a step back.
They don’t think you’re gonna do it, the kestrel said.
The head popped off like a cork. I felt light-headed. Ooze trickled between my thumb and forefinger.
Oh god, the kestrel said. Jesus, that’s gross.
But I did it, I said. And I’ll do it again and again. And I did it again and again.
The barn owl didn’t flap or scream. She held the decapitated chick in her talons, but she didn’t reach for a taste. I supposed it couldn’t compare to anything she’d butchered herself. We watched my uncle demonstrate the lure for Joshua. He wasn’t getting it right, but the kestrel went after it nonetheless. Back and forth, back and forth. The owl’s head bobbed, liquid black eyes staring through the lure and onward towards something I couldn’t see.
What was it like, I asked her, when you looked like me?
She turned her head two hundred and four degrees to look me in the eye.
Different, she said. My gizzard was harder to empty then.
by Bruce Scandling | Feb 17, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
We walk cautiously along the trail in leaden morning light, here for the spawning salmon and for a change. That’s how she said it on the phone last week, my daughter: I need a big fucking change of scenery.
The forest is dank, decayed, ripe with torn-open fish carried from the creek by bears. Alders and spruce collect the mist and drip ceaselessly. Leaves of Devil’s Club are yellow and veined with autumnal inevitability. We stop every few minutes, watching the water and listening for whatever is out there in the woods.
She could be from an outdoors catalog, my only child. With her athletic build, a no-nonsense rope of braided black hair, and her eight-weight flyrod. Except her denim is flecked with mud, she wears no makeup, and her skin is scaly. There is a new puffiness around her neck and under her jawline. She does not smile.
We talk only haltingly along the trail. I want to announce our presence in the forest, to avoid surprises downstream. And I want to understand. I know only that the other woman, her once-declared partner-for-life, walked away after my daughter’s second failed pregnancy. The partner had said she was tired of all the disappointment.
The word my daughter used was empty. She had flown back to Alaska for a long weekend away from her work and her suddenly quiet townhouse. When I picked her up along the airport curb, the first words I managed to say were, “How are you feeling?”
Empty, she told me, what else would you expect?
Her mother has been gone three years now, and I am not good at this. I don’t believe I was disengaged, yet as our daughter grew into a young woman, it was the two of them who would sit for hours laughing, crying, and apparently making sense of the cosmos. Last boyfriend. First girlfriend. Cut from the swim team. Poor decisions at weekend parties. When our daughter announced she was sick of the president and his misogynistic bullshit, her mother convinced her not to drop out of college and move to Australia to work on a fishing boat.
Then there was the crash, my wife’s tires sliding on black ice, the truck off the bank and into the ocean, her body finally recovered amidst a school of wintering salmon. My daughter shouldered our loss like a mountain guide, carrying her own burdensome sorrow while propping me up. She was sturdy and dependable, at least around me. Her girlfriend – the forever partner – must have seen the rest.
And now, along our trail, she seems adrift. We find a promising stretch of water and clamber down the bank. It is a short wade across to a sandbar. Beyond, the creek foams around rocks, swirls under rotting deadfall, and eases into deepening pools. We distance ourselves and cast, hopeful. These fish have returned from years at sea, some laden with eggs and searching, miraculously, to give birth and die in the exact gravel beds where they hatched.
Finally, she yells as a coho erupts in chrome fury. The salmon zings line from her reel, rushes upstream, and bursts from the water again. My daughter carefully follows the fish, begins to win the tug-of-war. Eventually, she pulls her catch into the slack water at her feet. She backs away from the creek, her rod curled into an arc under the strain. She slides the fish onto the sand. It is gleaming, exhausted. Its gills pulse, gasp. I anticipate oily filets and finger the knife sheathed at my side.
My daughter kneels over the salmon. With a twist of her wrist, she removes the fluorescent green fly. She cups the fish, one hand under its belly, the other grasping the tapered body just in front of the tail. She bends and kisses it on the head, prepared to return it to the water. She hesitates and kisses it again. Then a third time.
Finally, she eases it back into the creek, where it pauses to recuperate as its gills filter oxygen from the cool, unsullied, innocent water. In an instant,t the salmon darts into the current and is gone.
She turns to me and shrugs. Then, she takes off her boots and wades into the pool.
I drop my gear and run towards her as she leans forward and gently slips under the surface. I can see the red of her checked plaid shirt as she is pulled downstream by the current. She comes up for air in a wide green pool and rolls gently onto her back. She looks at me and raises her hand as if waving a slow, calm goodbye.
She turns away and rhythmically kicks her feet, headed towards the ocean.
by Emily Rinkema | Feb 13, 2025 | contest winner, micro
On our first date, our only date, I lied to you when you asked me about my biggest fear. Sinkholes, I said. My therapist had suggested I cultivate a tangible one, something I could see and avoid rather than my fear of time, which was abstract and ubiquitous enough to be paralyzing. The lies came fast after that, smooth little rocks that I set on the table between us: Yes, I like French cinema; no, I just haven’t met the right guy yet; yes, I love to hike.
I probably should have told you the truth. I should have told you that I don’t have calendars or clocks in my apartment. I should have told you that I count in loops backwards from 60 when I start to panic. I should have told you that I can’t look at stars because their distance is measured in years, that I don’t acknowledge birthdays, that there wouldn’t be a second date because two points make a timeline.
That night as we lay in bed, no light coming through the curtains I closed tight enough to keep out the moon, you said not to worry, that you’d protect me from my fear. For just a moment I thought maybe I’d let you try. Maybe this time would be different. But then I remembered all the lies, stacked like a cairn–nineteen, eighteen, seventeen–and I laughed. I told you there was nothing you could do, and I’m afraid it probably came across as dismissive, particularly when I got out of bed and pulled on my dress, listing facts about limestone soil and underground rivers.
I liked you. You were kind.
As I slid on my sandals, I told you that the thing about sinkholes is that you can’t prepare for them because you don’t see them coming. The groundwater washes away the soil between the rocks, I told you, leaning over to kiss you, and then, three, two, one, it all collapses.
by Rachana Pathak | Feb 10, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
The teenagers on the subway were giddy as they downed their Starbursts, shrieking and giggling, trading yellows, reds, and oranges. Reeya remembered those days of sugar highs and how they had whispered about who did what or did not do what. And how she and her sister had walked, arms linked, behind their father on the congested Kathmandu street until they saw the candy man who was wiry, dark-skinned, and scraggly-bearded but carried a coveted stick. This upright stick was adorned with sugar treats, cotton puffs, and metallic pinwheels, which drew her in. She begged her father to buy something, anything, just one, please, please. He succumbed, not due to her begging, but because it enabled him to indulge in a packet of paan, addictive and carcinogenic. The candy man handed them their treats, baring his scary, red-stained teeth against his mournful but kind eyes. The brightly colored wrappers later appeared strewn all over the city, a place with no infrastructure, sewage system, or garbage bins, and a poor, downtrodden soul picked up the littered wrappers, one by one manually, an actual living street sweeper whose labor never ended, nor was rewarded. People flung debris in his direction, and mothers warned their kids that they would end up like the street sweeper if they did not study—a further slight on his wretched existence. Reeya downed the entire candy pack on the street in one go, mimicking her father, who downed his cancer-causing paan, and they both got high, grinning at their complicity before they reached home, where her mother would scold them. Her sister, in contrast, savored her packet, selecting one pellet at a time, letting the piece dissolve entirely in her mouth without biting or cheating, and storing the rest for later, allowing for a nighttime indulgence, more forward-thinking and refined than Reeya. This was the era of pre-diabetes, pre-adulthood, and pre-responsibility.
Now, Reeya lived in a different country, older and besieged with responsibility. The subway stopped, and she dashed up the stairs, maintaining pace with the rush-hour equilibrium, but she slowed once she approached street level and found herself inside a chain drugstore, where the candy selection filled two entire aisles, not just a mere stick. She splurged on a pack of Starbursts like the carefree subway kids, tapping her credit card without speaking or making eye contact with the clerk, who was preoccupied with her cell phone—a transaction in the strictest sense. Reeya left the rectangular cement building, walked several blocks, and stood outside her office, checking her watch as she picked out the red squares and peeled the wrappers off in the eight precious minutes before her start time. There was no father to conspire with, nor a sister to compete against, nor a candy man with his fanciful packets of sugar, nor a manual street sweeper to pick up the litter. Reeya threw her torn wrappers into the garbage bin on the corner, and she did not have to see or think about the landfill they would end up in this civilized nation. And with that slight sugar rush, she stepped into her office.
by Jisun Park | Feb 6, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
I trace a line from the top of her forehead to the tip of her nose, a peachy pink so delicate it has the silken texture of a rose petal at the peak of its bloom. Her tiny lips pucker, and her fingers flex open, revealing a hand in its most miniature form, more doll than human. I marvel at this creature, so untouched and unbruised that she seems unearthly. “Are you of this world?” I whisper. And so small. So, so small. I watch her, lying on the bed, and I go over the notes from my pre-natal baby care class in my head.
Make sure she eats every two to three hours, or she won’t put on weight and may die.
Make sure she is peeing four to six times a day; if not, she isn’t getting enough to eat and may die.
Make sure to wash your hands before you touch her; she could get sick from harmful bacteria and die.
Make sure she doesn’t put anything too small in her mouth; she could choke on it and die.
Make sure she sleeps on her back with nothing in the crib, or she could stop breathing and die.
It occurs to me that there are an infinite number of ways that my baby could die, and it is up to me, an untrained civilian with no prior experience whatsoever, to anticipate them all. They say babies, children, people are hardy. “Stronger than you think!” But only the parents of those who have already mastered living say that.
I think of the ways that I could kill my baby: I could drop her, roll onto her in my sleep, sit on her, feed her something that chokes her.
I think of the ways that others could kill my baby: she could get hit by a car; she could be in a car that gets hit by another car; she could get kidnapped and murdered; she could be shot at school.
I think of the ways that my baby’s own body could kill her: cancer, that could be growing inside of her in the dark even now, in her bones or in her blood.
I think of how my baby could just die on her own for no reason at all. Her heart could just stop beating. She could just stop breathing. And that would be it.
And none of this is close to an exhaustive list.
I watch the news and see pictures of children in their posed photos, gap-toothed and shiny-eyed, the last school photos they got to take before they died, and the faces of those children morph into the face of my own child. I wonder about the mothers of those children. How do they survive it? How do they go on? It seems impossible. It seems absurd. I think that if it happened to me, if my baby died, I would just collapse on the spot and fold into the dirt and not ever want to move again. But having lived on this earth for a while, I know that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to keep going. You’re supposed to live on. People sympathize for a while, but after too long of a time, they get annoyed. If I continued to lie in the dirt, that would be attention-seeking and melodramatic. People only have so much patience for grief.
So I practice the hard thing that I don’t think I can do so that I can do it one day if I have to. I imagine that my baby has died. I imagine the cold shock of the news. I imagine the disorienting nausea, the ringing in my ears, my tears. The prickling sweat on the soles of my feet that only comes when something incredibly terrible happens. It’s difficult, but I can do it. Then I imagine the funeral. The people who come with their gray faces. This is very difficult. There is something about having your grief mirrored in someone else’s face that magnifies it. And when I get to the burial, a small box suspended over a hole of the same size in the ground, that is when I lose it. I know I can’t let them put her down there. My heart is on fire, and I can’t let them do it because she would be alone and scared, and it is so so dark in the earth, in that box, and if I let them put her in the ground, she would really be dead and I lied when I said I could do the part where I found out she died because I don’t think I can and I might not ever stop crying and I might just drown in my own tears. But that might be okay if that means I could go with her. We could be in the box together and in the ground together and neither of us would be alone or scared. We would just be. Together.
At this point, I am heaving with sobs, congested with snot, and I have to shake myself out of it. What am I doing? Stop being an idiot and thinking these stupid and crazy things. Take a breath. And another. And another. I lie down next to her, the summer sunlight reflecting off the white walls and wrapping us in gold, her quick, soft breath cooling the dampness on my face. I watch the tick-tock of her chest, the silent metronome of her beating heart. I slide my finger under hers and she grasps it, curling her fingers around mine, her grip surprisingly strong and tenacious. No one told me about this, that love could be so stricken, that it could make my own life feel so precarious. That love could tie my pulse to another’s. We’ll just have to keep each other alive, I tell her. Your life is in my hands, but now my life is in yours, too.
by Claudia Monpere | Feb 3, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
Your best friend, Meg, is scared for you. She wants to accompany you to the lake, but you need to be alone, so you drive there and wander the aspen grove, leaves trembling in the light wind. You touch the smooth, greenish-white bark, the rough, eye-shaped branch scars. You hold your hand among the leaves, feeling them flicker in the light wind. You touch the coarse granite boulders. You walk along the shore to your favorite granite slab, remove your clothes, and feel its polished surface on your cheek, tummy, arms, and legs. You dive into the water, welcoming its chill, and then you drive home, where your ex-boyfriend, who still has a key, surprises you.
He wants to make love one last time, and although you hate him now—you’d begun feeling this way even before he reported you— he’s a man with influence who could make things worse for you, and maybe, just maybe, his touch will be tender, and linger in the dismal time ahead. But his eyes are glacial as he touches your neck. You apologize and say this was a mistake, completely your fault. You ask him to please leave, apologizing again and again.
After he leaves, you touch your body. You have no interest in an orgasm. You realize how much of your body you’ve never touched with intention: the satiny inside of your arms, your knuckles’ bony hills– Why did you never notice how irregular they are?– the helix of your ear, the smooth fleshy texture of your mouth’s soft palate, the firm ridges of the hard palate. You pluck a hair and marvel. Only one hair, yet you can feel its silky texture.
Meg comes over and cooks for you: snapper ceviche with jicama, lime, and toasted pumpkin seeds; fresh chickpeas with feta and roasted red pepper sauce; scallops with parsnip puree, fruit tart. Tender, crumbly, crunchy, buttery, creamy, crispy, velvety. You eat and weep at the glorious textures. You and Meg hug throughout dinner. She’s stopped coaxing you to flee. You both know what happens to women who are caught. After dinner, Meg massages your feet with lotion. You object, but she tells you this is what best friends do.
The car pulls up at exactly 7:30 pm, and some official and his driver take you to the hospital, where you change and are led to the chapel, lit with candles, packed with journalists, politicians, and people waving signs. The senator stands at the pulpit in a halo of light. He commands silence. You stand in your hospital gown, facing him. “Touch,” says the senator, “is the first sense felt in the womb. Even before sight and hearing.” He pauses, looking directly at you, then continues. “Your baby will never feel your loving arms holding her. You’ll never feel her petal soft cheeks. You took her life as she bloomed in your womb.” Silence. Then he roars, accompanied by others in the chapel, chanting: “Your pleasure in touch will be no more. The culture of death—you opened that door.”
Flanked by two doctors, you leave the chapel and walk toward the operating room. You’ll be able to feel pain after the surgery. Heat. No other sensation of touch. Ever. The idea is suffering, not death. The nurse prepping you explains the steps of the operation in a gentle, halting voice. Her eyes tear up when she tells you what to expect after. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m new here.” Just before inserting the IV that will put you under, she asks if you’d like to touch her hair. “I used my best conditioner, so it feels extra soft.” “No, thank you,” you say. You raise your palms to your face and stroke your cheeks. You blink rapidly a few times, feeling your lids go down and up, down and up. You kiss every other finger, slowly, then close your eyes.
by Dennis Michael | Jan 30, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
The uranium bird has been picking seeds from my lawn. It’s easy to tell where it’s been; it leaves behind a trail of brown, wilted grass or shriveled tree leaves. It lives somewhere near the end of the road near the brook, I think. I’ve seen it there when I’ve been out jogging, marbled bright orange and pitch black, cooling off in the water. Little puffs of steam float up as it wades in. It’s supposed to be quite dense, uranium, so I don’t know how it is able to fly, but it does. We tried to photograph it once, but the images came out all white and overexposed.
A local boy tried to steal one of its eggs, but his hand got burned badly and they had to take it off. When the eggs hatch, the babies always come out deformed. One had two beaks for eyes; another was born with a couple of tentacles dangling out of its stomach. It looked like some kind of hybrid octopus-bird creature, or at least so I’ve heard. The babies don’t last long; they usually live just long enough to hop out of the nest, and then they fall apart. Sometimes, you find little piles of uranium bird parts lying around, or even just a single leg or a head.
I’ve been getting headaches. They start at the back of my head and make their way up to my ears. The doctors don’t help much; they just keep asking me if I grind my teeth at night. I don’t know, I tell them. They say I should relax. Every spring, I used to wake up an extra 30 minutes early and just lay in bed and meditate, listening to chirping perched birds and the white noise of passing cars outside. A few years ago is when I started hearing the uranium bird; it has a very distinct sound. It starts out very high-pitched but then quickly drops down to bass frequencies. Sweeping the spectrum. It does this in under a second, like an accelerated Doppler effect. How such a low sound can come out of such a small mouth is beyond my understanding of acoustics. It might be a quantum effect. Anyway, now all I can hear when I wake up is this ungodly sound every few seconds, and I can’t meditate anymore. It’s hard enough to live in this area, having to worry about that little fucker flying around shooting alpha particles at us; moreover, I can’t even sit in bed and relax for a few minutes before I start my day.
I’m honestly not sure why this bird needs to be eating my seeds. I don’t know why it even needs to eat at all; it should be able to naturally act as its own energy source, just due to the heat generated by radioactive decay. I mean, they make power plants out of the stuff. I need those seeds to grow a full lawn, and in addition to losing the seeds, the little brown patches it leaves behind always need to be fixed. I’ve been thinking of how to get rid of it, but it’s not easy. I looked up the chemistry of how to dissolve uranium, and now I think I’m on some kind of government watchlist. I hear buzzing in the walls of my house, extra breathing on the phone. I’ve thought of ways to crush the bird, but it’s made of pure metal, harder than steel. You’d need something like titanium or diamond. I’ve thought of ways of trapping it in a box and starving it, but it has a half-life of 4 billion years.
I’m sitting on my lawn, reading a book and sipping a cold glass of sangria made with fresh fruit from our garden. Trying to relax. The uranium bird is just across the street in my neighbor’s yard. It seems to notice me and starts to walk towards me. It clinks as its little metal feet walk across the pavement. It pauses as it reaches the middle of the road, daring a car to come by and challenge it. It thinks it owns this whole neighborhood, the little piece of shit. It flies up and perches itself on the top of my fence. It’s just sitting there staring at me, not moving. I take a sip of my sangria and stare back. It hops down onto my lawn. I see the tips of the grass around it start to turn brown and curl. It flies over and pecks me on the shoulder, I bat it away. The sangria goes flying. The bird comes at my head, making its frequency-hopping, unnatural chirping sound as it darts in. I duck, swirl, and smash it to the ground by swinging my hardcover novel at it with both hands. It falls to the ground, and I pick it up with my bare hand. I stick its head into my mouth and bite into it, twisting and tearing as hard as I can. Its head somehow comes off. I try to chew it but I can’t, it’s made of solid metal. It tastes metallic, and I start hearing noises, not in my ears but inside my head. I spit its head out and throw down its lifeless body onto the grass. My head is burning. Everything is spinning, and I fall to the ground. The grass is thick where I am laid out, beautiful and green. The noises in my head stop. I hear the other birds chirping in the distance, naturally. Cars are passing by with their white noise. I close my eyes and relax.
by Fractured Lit | Jan 30, 2025 | Uncategorized
judged by Dan Chaon
February 15, 2025, to April 13, 2025 (Closed)
submit
This contest is now closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted and trusted us with your writing!
We invite writers to submit to the Fractured Lit Ghost, Fable, and Fairy Tales Prize from February 15, 2024, to April 13, 2025.
We’re looking for stories that use flash fiction’s unique use of brevity and lyricism to create new twists on these familiar traditions. We want stories that take a slant approach, that create and illuminate the shadows, that awaken us to new ways of looking at our past and future; stories that scare us with their resonance, their attention to detail, and characters who get in and out of trouble. Don’t be afraid to use parts and pieces of all of these storytelling tropes and traditions in order to Frankenstein something never before seen. This contest produces some of the most imaginative submissions each year, and we look forward to reading your creations!
Guest Judge
Dan Chaon will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Dan Chaon’s newest book, One of Us, is forthcoming in October 2025. He is the author of seven previous books, including Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the New York Times Best Seller Await Your Reply; and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Cleveland.
Here’s what Dan looks for in a flash fiction story:
To me, flash fiction is not just a very short story or a poem in prose. It’s a unique form in its own right. Perhaps the closest corollaries are the koan and the riddle and the joke. Or the stiletto. The best flash fiction pierces you-it’s a stab, a slap, visceral and shocking, though “flash” doesn’t necessarily mean “flashy.” It may be as quiet as a barely exhaled final breath.
We hope this prompt inspires you to create something out of your normal routine, that allows you to dip into the wellspring of your creativity, and helps you tell the story only you could tell.
guidelines
- Your $20 reading fee allows up to two stories of 1,000 words or fewer each per entry-if submitting two stories, please put them both in a SINGLE document.
- We allow multiple submissions-each set of two micro/flash stories should have a separate submission accompanied by a reading fee.
- Writers from historically marginalized groups will be able to submit for free until we reach our cap of 25 free submissions. No additional fee waivers will be granted.
- Please send micro/flash fiction only-1,000 word count maximum per story.
- We only consider unpublished work for contests-we do not review reprints, including self-published work (even on blogs and social media). Reprints will be automatically disqualified.
- Simultaneous submissions are okay-please notify us and withdraw your entry if you find another home for your writing.
- All entries will also be considered for publication in Fractured Lit.
- Double-space your submission and use Times New Roman 12 (or larger if needed).
- Please include a brief cover letter with your publication history (if applicable). In the cover letter, please include content warnings as well, to safeguard our reading staff.
- We only read work in English, though some code-switching/meshing is warmly welcomed.
- We do not read anonymous submissions. However, shortlisted stories are sent anonymously to the judge.
- Unless specifically requested, we do not accept AI-generated work. For this contest, AI-generated work will be automatically disqualified.
The deadline for entry is April 13, 2025. We will announce the shortlist within 10-12 weeks of the contest’s close. All writers will be notified when the results are in.
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by Fractured Lit | Jan 28, 2025 | interview
Robert Shapard’s collection, Bare Ana and Other Stories, will be released by Regal House Publishing in February. Winner of the 2022 W.S. Porter Prize, this full-length collection brings to life an array of flash and short-short stories that are by turns delightful and heartrending.
Readers might have high expectations of a book by such a renowned trailblazer in the flash form; Shapard’s career includes co-creating and co-editing the iconic anthology, Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, in 1986, continuing through W. W. Norton’s long-lived and long-loved flash anthology series, including Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World.
I believe readers will not be disappointed in Bare Ana. Each story is masterfully crafted with an eye to character and circumstance. Shapard’s expertise and unique voice are on full display here. Nothing is predictable in these pages; the settings are vivid in ways you might not expect, and the characters face choices that will make your pulse race. I predict these stories will haunt you long after you’ve closed the book.
—Myna Chang
***
Myna Chang: First, tell us about Bare Ana and Other Stories. Did you have a particular goal in putting the collection together? Were you hoping to share a specific theme or mood with your readers?
Robert Shapard: I asked myself those same questions. A friend suggested a working title, “Water Issues and Other Safety Concerns,” like I was compiling a manual. It was tongue in cheek, though I did have a character walk on water in one of my stories. Another sank in a warm bathtub full of goldfish. But the stories are serious, even if a few have comedic elements. Anyway the working title is too long. Have you noticed how giant those block letters are on book covers now? And where would the bookstore clerks shelve a book with a name like a manual, in the “Self Help” section? I was re-discovering my own stories as I gathered them. Most are recent, but a few go way back. What I found, more than anything, was I loved the people in them. To me any could be the title character for a collection. Ana was the only one who lived in the future. In that way, she sort of stood above them all. And, if you put “other stories” in little letters, her name fit on the cover.
MC: I’d love to focus on your title story, “Bare Ana” (Juked, 2005). As a speculative fiction fan, I was struck by your compelling world-building. With a few quick strokes, you establish a distinct backdrop of social and cultural expectations, while keeping the reader grounded in the familiar. I’m curious about your approach to creating such a rich and complex stage without allowing it to overshadow your characters. How do you achieve the right balance?
Robert: I admire world-builder writers like Chris McKinney, who publishes with Soho Press. In his latest novel he has all humanity living under massive pressure at the bottom of Earth’s oceans. But “Bare Ana” is just a very short story, with hardly any room to construct a future world. So I had Ana’s young husband do it. He has advantages—his listeners are in the future, too, so he doesn’t have to explain the technology. When he refers to a “stem,” they already know what it is. We readers in the past have to put two and two together, but it doesn’t take long. The stem is in the middle of the parlor, and the tattoo lady goes right to it, so we know it’s important. Soon holograms are shooting up from it into the air along with commercials. That’s pretty much all we need to know about stems and a lot about this future society.
When he speaks of a “blooming” in the skin he’s reminding his listeners how excited they got when they were kids. It also puts us past readers in suspense with how blooming can go wrong. Other things like pre-natal teeth straightening simply function as examples without needing elaboration. And the reactions of the characters themselves can tell us a lot, like at the end when the nurse and doctor are both congratulatory and bored with the monstrous infant at birth.
There’s an anecdote for this that’s perfect. It’s the one about Gertrude Stein calling Ezra Pound a “village explainer.” She meant a particular kind of village idiot who is compelled to constantly explain things to people that they already know. I didn’t want Ana’s husband to be a village explainer.
MC: Stories with a strong sense of place stick with me. “Motel” is such a story—the dark road, the cinder-block motel, the utter isolation. And the dust! Can you talk about your inspiration for this piece? In addition, I wonder which came first for you: the characters or the location?
Robert: Location. It also came with a ready-made event. At 17, I was in a car with friends and crashed into just such a motel. It was on just such a night in just such a tiny town near the border of West Texas, South Texas, and Mexico. No one was hurt. Later, we did get thrown into a Mexican jail. But we’re not in “Motel” at all. The people in the story are completely made up. Where they came from is a mystery to me, and I care for them more than anything that actually happened to me.
MC: I think the cars of our youth often hold an almost mythical place in our memories. In your collection, several of your characters drive a Buick. Does this hold a special significance for you? Does it represent a certain time or place or mood?
Robert: I grew up in my grandparents’ house. My grandfather was a civil engineer who owned a company that built streets. It was a tough business, always competing for the lowest bid, and he drove the cheapest possible company car. But my grandmother—who was wise, loving, smoked, drank, gambled, and was the first woman driver in her small Texas city— had a pink Buick. It was the luxury model that had four, not just three, fake portholes on each side, like some weird rocket ship out of the Jetsons. It lacked the usual luxury whitewall tires, but my grandfather insisted the cheaper blackwalls functioned just as well. The power steering made for effortless driving except for hard, tight turns in parking lots, when its hydraulics made high-pitched squabbling sounds like an alarmed turkey. I loved that car. It must be buried in my subconscious because it has now supplied me with Buicks for three different stories. To be fair to my subconscious, I’d like to note that it has also supplied cheaper cars in other stories, including a 1947 Ford coupe and a 1978 Ford Pinto.
MC: Throughout the collection, I noted an embrace of white space and an ending note of ambiguity, inviting me in and allowing me the freedom to interact with the characters and settings in my own way. I love that! Do you consciously create this accessibility for the reader? Does it arise organically as you write, or is this something you layer in (or extract) in your editing process?
Robert: I like to think my stories end when no more needs to be said. It’s true they don’t all end with the snap of a lid. It makes me think of Grace Paley’s story “Mother,” which opens with her saying she always wanted to write a story about her mother and end it with the line “And then she died.” Yet we’re surprised somehow, when she does end with that. How did she do that? It took me years to realize that Paley could probably write for the rest of her life about her mother. So she came up with an anti-non-ending, and nailed it.
My story “The Dummy” caused a debate among the editors who nonetheless published it. One side insisted the story didn’t properly end. The other side said no, it was a challenge. A questioning of what a story is. To me the challenge wasn’t whether it was an ending or non-ending but just finding one. When the narrator discovered the body, he could have just said, “It was my father. He was dead. The End,” like Grace Paley’s story. But re-reading the story now, I see the father wasn’t real, in so many ways. I suspect as an actor he was just pretending to be the sixth-grade football coach. He even came to the dinner table dressed in various acting roles, pretending to be someone else, like King Lear or the Sheriff of Nottingham. Clearly, the narrator doesn’t want to lose him. The father’s like a movie the kid doesn’t want to end. Now, I’m seeing so many elements I didn’t know how to explain at the time. Yes, clearly the end is a call for reader participation. But what about the boy? He ran away from home in high school and had to be dragged home again. Did he have mental issues? Is he having one now? Is he the one who doesn’t know how to end? In one last look at the father, I see the one true thing about him now, whether he’s real or, as the story says, made of crumpled paper. He always loved the boy and his mother.
Another “white space” story that is easier to untangle is “Turtle Creek.” I tried longer versions with different endings. I followed the mystery of the couple missing from the wreck (never solved), I traced the lives of the youths at the party, who mostly didn’t come to anything. Were they a wrecked generation? It felt good, like whacking weeds, cutting those endings. I kept the shorter version, the one now in the book, trying it on everyday readers like trainers at the gym and acquaintances at the coffee shop. At the non-ending, all of them, independently, flared their eyes for a second. Then they all said the same thing: “That was my high school!” I’m not sure what this means, but it’s been audience-tested. I consider it an ending.
MC: Is there a specific story that embodies the heart of the collection? Which story is your personal favorite?
Robert: It’s hard to pick favorites, but I especially enjoyed writing the ones invented out of whole cloth, that seemed to come out of nowhere, like “Lobster,” “Best Boy,” and “Bare Ana.” You could argue any story, no matter how purely invented, is partly woven out of bits of memory. But these seemed to be less weighed down by memory than to unfurl on the breeze of an idea. Most of my stories unfurl, so maybe together they’re the heart of the collection. But the first story and last story have special meanings for me, as a writer. I was a long story writer until the first story, “Thomas and Charlie,” showed me I could write flash fiction, and others followed. The last, “Julie Elmore,” won a prize as a very long story (under a different title) so I wasn’t inclined to change it. Then, a friend challenged me to turn it into a very short story. I did, wondering, If the three quarters I cut wasn’t necessary, how could it have won a prize? But now it’s a better story.
MC: You’ve anthologized short-shorts from some of the best-known authors in the world. Is there a dominant quality or element that initially drew you to those stories/authors? Are you still drawn to those aspects of story, or has that changed over the course of your career? Are there any favorite pieces that you go back to again and again?
Robert: When we started we were looking to help establish a new form of very short fiction that didn’t have a name. The literary establishment of the day considered them odd, unfinished pieces of longer, legitimate fiction. Often, if they spoke of them at all, it was to mock them. We liked them whatever their quality—funny, moving, powerful, charming, experimental—often with the reach and depth of a traditional story, just in a tiny space. That left your “dominant quality or element” in collecting them simple. They had to be short enough, and they had to be great, to quell those mocking critics. To focus on the story, we blacked out the names of authors on batches we sent around to readers, helping us rate them. Later, when we had to match the stories with author names, we weren’t surprised that some were well-known. More surprising was how many were not. Not everyone could write a great story, but a great story could be written by anyone. We always held to that. Yes, there were adjustments, such as for the international anthologies, where we relied on translators, some of them responding to the demand for work by well-known foreign authors. But they translated lesser-knowns, too, and the translators themselves were often lesser-known, and their work was brilliant. They added to the form, which by then had various names—flash fiction, sudden fiction, micro fiction.
You asked for favorite pieces. There are so many. Here are just a few:
In Flash Fiction Forward, Hannah Voskuil’s “Currents” is a story in reverse that we care about as it moves ever back in time. In Flash Fiction International, H.J. Shepard’s “Please Hold Me the Forgotten Way” and Edmundo Paz Soldán’s “Barnes” are perfect examples of an American flash versus a Latin American micro. In the “Theory” section, Katharine Coles’s is my go-to mini-essay on the difference between flash fiction and prose poem. I never tire of Jayne Anne Phillips on writing good one-page fictions (pair it with her essay, “Cheers,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction). Finally, in Sudden Fiction, John Cheever’s “Reunion” is perfect for a single class in characterization. But so is Sara Freligh’s “Reunion” (with the epigraph, “After John Cheever”), which I read recently in her book A Brief Natural History of Women. Cheever’s is brilliant, a two-dimensional snapshot; Freligh’s is equally brilliant and three-dimensional.
MC: Do you see any upcoming challenges (or opportunities!) facing flash writers/editors? Do you have any hopes or predictions for the field?
Robert: Since I go back a ways with flash I tend to look at the big picture. Not that long ago, translators Aili Mu and Julie Chiu were telling us flash had become highly popular in China because flashes are “device independent and compatible with today’s technology” and “offer relative freedom from censorship not enjoyed in other media.” Oppressive regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere have been known to censor not only news but fiction, and others may in the future. But flash isn’t just a reaction to politics. A young scholar from India, Dr. Ruchi Nagpal, came to Austin just this fall to explore the Harry Ransom Center’s Flash Fiction archive (it’s the world’s second, the world’s first is at the University of Chester’s Seaborne Library). She says, “Everyone in India has a smartphone and tablet,” and micros are everywhere. She’s also into flash theory, wants to anthologize flash fictions from other Asian countries, like Singapore, and is interested in long-thriving Spanish language forms like the microcuento. And now the rest of the world … but wait, let’s stop here, because if we add the United States and other English-speaking countries, we’ve already got more than half the world’s population.
That’s a long way from a time—not that long ago—when establishment critics were dismissing flash as hardly worth reading. So with its tremendous growth, has flash now become a true sub-genre of fiction, like the novel, novella, and short story? Does it matter? I see flash as still changing, exploring. Haven’t the novel and poetry changed over time as well?
As for new challenges and opportunities, I judge by what I see in bio notes these days. More writers are describing themselves as flash fiction writers, often in combination, such as “novelist, poet, and flash writer.” That tells me they’re expanding their vision and skills as a writer.
MC: What are you working on now? What’s next for you?
Robert: I write stories whenever they come to me. But today I’ve been sending around early copies of Bare Ana and Other Stories, hoping people will review it. (My publisher, Regal House, a wonderful, small, traditional press, does that too.) Last night a revision for my novel-in-progress woke me and I scribbled a note which I discovered this morning: “What if J never went to college? It changes everything.” Over coffee, I thought, “Was the J for Julie? or Jonathan?” If I remember, who knows where it will take me.
***
ROBERT SHAPARD’s stories have appeared in magazines such as New England Review, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing, 100 Word Story, The Literary Review, Juked, Bending Genres, New Flash Fiction Review, Fractured Lit, Kenyon Review, and Typishly. He and his wife live in Austin, Texas.
Find Robert:
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MYNA CHANG is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain. Her writing has been selected for W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction, and her poetry has received a Rhysling Award honorable mention. Find her at MynaChang.com and on Bluesky at @MynaChang.
by Kristin Jensen | Jan 27, 2025 | contest winner, flash fiction
We were in search of eggs. White ones like the moon, and some as big as newborn puppies in the palm. Biking wasn’t smart because you’d miss the little things hiding in the weeds and bushes, placed out there for us wives to find. It was the daddies of our men who told them what to do. And how to hold the eggs.
Debra, crazy-eyed, found hers first – small and speckled, like a quail egg. She cracked it against the curb at 24th and Mission, and it cried. It cried as we hunched in our large pastel dresses with wicker baskets, also looking. We covered our ears because of the sound and what we were told would be our good and broken hearts. We’d be cracked open and in real love – a love that women who are not mommas just can’t know – like not knowing how big the universe is.
I didn’t find my egg but stole another’s. I pushed her into the street. A bus was coming. I wanted to see her yolk.
***
I woke in my husband’s arms. I turned onto my side, and he curled around me. Dotted my neck with kisses. I put him inside.
When I got up, I looked back at our blue sheet with its melted goo. The spot looked like pee. I wondered how much urine a baby would make. My sister’s seven-year-old son still pees in the bed, which seems absurd.
“You made a puddle,” I said to him, joking.
In the bathroom, I got the syringe, bent, and my husband did it in my freckled bum. I cried out. Yelp!
He kissed the part where he poked. His father had done this for his wife. His father is progressive. He is a socialist. He’d taught my husband as a boy about the names of the parts of a vagina that I don’t even know.
My husband had also done this for his first wife. It had worked – they made a son, then divorced. He tells me every other day how much – how boundlessly – he loves his son. Sometimes, my husband cries, telling me this. I hold him for some time. “You will feel this love too when you have a baby,” he says. He is ten years older and I am thirty-three.
The boy is an annoying child who I am trying to like more or love. The journey from dislike, to like, to love feels like mountains.
When the boy enters our home, he hugs me. I pat his silky, brown hair. Then he runs in loops around the kitchen, asking to be chased, but he will always win the game. I fear I am becoming a mean-hearted person. Something like rust.
When the boy is with us, I try motherhood. Then ask silently for childhood when the boy is not. The distance between my childhood and motherhood also feels like mountains.
***
After the shot, I wobbled, wavered, and limped dramatically into the kitchen to heat the water in the kettle. More water on the stove for soft-boiled eggs. Cold water to just drink. It was a quiet Saturday morning with just the two of us. I asked him to dance. It was how we had met. I felt like magic again, like I could conjure the little thing.
***
I used to be good, real good, at Easter egg hunts growing up. I’d always get more than my sister. I ran for the bushes at the edge of the grass and kicked down stones with sayings like Grandfather’s Garden. I knew what was inside the plastic eggs and what they would taste like. I knew how it would better my life.
“Can I have that?” My young sister had pointed to a small, chocolate rabbit in my basket. She had sweat on her forehead.
“This isn’t Halloween,” I told her.
My sister is smart now and tells me how dreams have to do with fear. She tells me of the fears she had before her son. Like, what if the baby just had one eye, shouted all the time, turned on you, turned into you, left, told you how you’re shit, or didn’t come at all?
***
Last week, my husband printed out an article and read it to me in bed. The house was quiet. Near empty. I pushed up against him and then wiggled over the hill of his body, sagging my full weight onto him, and then dropped off the other side. What I remember from the article is how babies are the size of gummy bears when they’ve been in there for a month. He seemed restless. He licked his lips.
Lying back to look at the ceiling, I thought of what candy I knew, for sure, that I liked, in my basket. Peeps, Robin Eggs, and Jelly Bellies. He put his hand on my empty, and mysterious, belly and smiled, wide, hopeful, and beautifully at me.
I fell asleep into a hunt, wearing a space suit with a spear, to shish-kabob planets.
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