Lemonade

I hear ‘im before ‘e arrives on the street, bottles rattling together like bones. Mam’s in the kitchen holding onto a cuppa tea like it’s a life raft, eyes sore and swollen as lemons with all the cryin’. She kicked Sammy out last night – caught ‘im spyin’ on Kel as she got ready fer swimming. He’s allus bin a bit of a creep ‘as Sammy – mi other sister said she’d caught ‘im lookin’ at ‘er when Mam wasn’t there. She threatened to kick ‘im in the balls – no-one messes with our Kat.

Anyhow I can hear Popman rattling through the estate, and I’ve got mi clean bottles ready to swap for pennies and I’m looking forrad to a cool glass of lemonade with the chippy tea Mam’s promised. And I’m gonna gi‘er a few of mi pennies, just to show I appreciates ‘er, just to show I loves ‘er.

Dandelion and Burdock

Mam’s at kitchen table when I gets in from school, hands around a mug of summat that I’m pretty sure isn’t tea. These days she allus looks knackered. Since Sammy went she doesn’t sleep and ‘er eyes look like maw of a grave – like mi Dad’s afore they lowered ‘im into it. I gies ‘er a cuddle that slides off ‘er like rain, and I just wants to know, just to know ‘ow to mek ‘er better. ‘Ow to mek ‘er the Mam she was afore our Mickey were born cold, afore Dad took ’is own life and left ‘er to deal with me and Kel and Kat by ‘erself. Afore Sammy come and med things better, and then worse.

Popman’s bin and I get meself a glass of D&B and I remember our Kat once rubbing burdock onto a patch of nettle stings on mi ankle, remember it soothing and cooling, calming the angry red rash, and I pour mi Mam a glass and leave it by her hand and cross mi fingers that she might drink it, that it might help.

American Cream Soda

Today were a good day. Today we ‘ad mi ole Mam back. I gets in from school and she’s mekin dinner – fishie fingers as crispy as yer like, and them chips yer put in oven – a bit soggy but we don’t bother – and mushy peas that mek kitchen smell of farts and we mek Mam laugh rasping with our lips on ‘er neck and ‘er arms as she’s tryna get stuff done.

Popman’s bin and she’s got these big ole pint glasses which she fills with American Cream Soda, then she scoops a perfect egg shape out of a big tub of vanilla and drops it in the glass. Pop sizzles and bubbles like sea at bottom of cliffs, and the icecream pops back up and floats like an island, like Kelham Island mebbes. She slips in stripey straws, and we suck and suck and suck, and it’s like drinking candy floss, like drinking the happiest memory you ever had.

Cherryade

It were our Kat that found ‘er. Sitting at kitchen table like allus, smell of marzipan fillin’ room, smell of marzipan and vodka and an empty bottle of pills reght next to ‘er hand. She’d bin taken away by time me and Kel got in and there’s all these uniform types millin’ around the place. Our Kat’s 18, old enough to tek us on, but she looks scared and sad and small. She looks just like mi Mam.

Popman’s bin and there’s a fresh bottle of Cherryade on side waiting for us, like Mam thought we might want a bit of pop with our death in the afternoon. There’s a small pile of coins beside it – pennies and tuppence mostly, the odd five pee – and I slip ‘em into mi pocket as if they might help, as if they might mek things better.

The author’s distinctive voice imbues the work with a sense of originality. The use of drinks as symbolism and the exploration of memory as a theme are particularly noteworthy and brilliantly crafted.

Mustapha Enesi

The sickly sweet taste and corrosive of soda pop is the backdrop and innovative structure to a tragic family story beautiful told in poetic language; lines such as “a perfect egg shape out of a big tub of vanilla” blew us away making this story a clear and deserving winner. 

Camilla Grudova

country kid in country clothes comes to the city to revel and rebel in ways his Christian parents would disown him for, but they won’t ever know because that was the whole point in coming here, to graze among the flowing queens and exaggerated queers and all the other seductive strangers, more kin to him than his own, but he has no money so he sells his ass on weeping streets and comes to know the girls who call them home, and they teach him how to survive, where to get clothes and soup, and what johns to stay away from, and where to score the best dope, because you need something to round off the sharp edges in this city of straight lines and caustic wit, burning bridges and flaming towers like thorns that fling the sunlight back and forth, one to another in a circle of blazing light, and it’s too bright and too hard and everything’s for sale here, hearts and souls, and the streets are choked with empty people, racing, pacing, breathless, feckless, and he hurts so bad inside, he cries his way to sleep at night and wishes he’d never left but he couldn’t be himself or hide the sinful truth, and everything they ever taught him about being good and decent and proper gnaws at his mind even as the rats gnaw at his toes and he kicks them away and they squeal as they run, then one night he gets picked up by this nice old john who says his name is Stephen and maybe he can help, but the help he offers is a regular job and a trip to rehab, and the kid turns him down because he can’t leave behind the life he’s come to know as normal, and it’s amazing what a person can get used to but they say that’s how it goes, the abnormal becomes normal, and one morning he wakes up early and goes to the park and a blackbird warbles just for him, and the grass is frost-silvered and skin-soft, so he takes off his sneakers and walks barefoot to touch the earth and ground himself, and the cold makes him shiver but it’s okay because it reminds him of doing the same once, walking barefoot on the sterile lawn at home on an uneasy summer’s afternoon while he tried to convince himself he belonged where he was, and his mother was cooking dinner and there was love and softness and the smell of pot-roast snorkelling through the kitchen window, and inside, his father was reading the newspaper with his feet up on the stool in front of him because he was tired after working a long week and there was more to come the next week, and he spoke over dinner about how life never stopped, how one day tumbled over another like they were in a game of chase, and if you didn’t seize hold of them, they’d pass you by, and when the kid heard him say it, he knew he had to leave, and he did, that very night, and ended up in the city in bare feet walking on icy grass while a blackbird chortles at him and he knows what it’s saying, that he should go home, go home, to where he’s loved and missed and broken hearts will be mended by prodigal’s return, then he steps on something sharp, a piece of glass, stuck in his flesh now, and when he pulls it out, there’s blood, and the pain cuts deep so he sucks in his breath and grits his teeth, and limps back to where he finds shelter, with the street girls and the new boys who’ve just come in from the country, and they look up to him and respect him because he’s been here so long, how long he can’t say, but the new boys need someone to show them the ropes, where to score the best dope and what johns to avoid, so maybe he’ll go home someday but the days tumble one after another and there’s never enough time, money, food, dope, sex, booze, love, but there is a sort of love here, the kind that’s born of weary, hand-me-down despair and being lost inside himself and crying out that there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, and that night, a rat licks the dried blood from the sole of his foot and he doesn’t bother to kick it away because he knows a kindred spirit when he sees it, and everyone needs to find their place in the world, even if they’re just city rats, a long way away from anything like home. 

The writing and story possess a distinct tone of defiance that sets them apart. I appreciate how the author’s willingness to take risks paid off and how the themes of acceptance and social class interweaved seamlessly, resulting in a cohesive and compelling narrative.

Mustapha Enesi

This feverish rewriting of Country Mouse/City Mouse with a queer undertone pays homage to young city lives in vivid prose. 

Camilla Grudova

Whooping cough. That was the first thing my sister gave me. Me, with my crushed-velvet flesh and sea creature fingers, her with thick bunches and dungarees. I was four months old but Mum fetched the story down so often I could almost smell the vomit-scent cellular blanket. Mum had to suck mucus from my nose with a plastic bulb and Mrs Evans – who never let us tread on her lawn, even when our ball went over – came to the end of her drive when the ambulance arrived just to watch because what else did you do in the ’80s? 

The doctors thought I might not live. 

And then there was the scar she gave me above my right eye. Swingball bat. I still see it coming towards me, her red face, spit on her lip. Afterwards she gave me the Chupa Chups lolly that Dad bought her from the hospital shop. I asked her once if she hit me on purpose and I expected her to laugh but she ran her long hair into her mouth and pulled it out in sharp wet points and asked if I wanted a wine. 

My sister gave me Mum. Well. She left her up for grabs when she took Dad and I mean, she took all of him. All of his eyes and thoughts and all the timid little hopes that we don’t expose to natural light. ‘Have you thought, Doll, about medicine?’ He always called her Doll even though her name was Sarah. He gave a lot of thought to what she might do when she grew up. He enjoyed travelling into imagined futures, framing her in different costumes. ‘What about law?’ 

‘I’d like to be a doctor, Dad.’ 

He looked at me like I was lost change. A spare sock. Sometimes I think she didn’t even want him, like carrying all that attention was too much for one person but she didn’t know how to set it down.

Mum worried a lot so, in that sense, my sister also gifted me medium-grade anxiety. 

Dad was there-not-there, like most dads in those days, until Sarah appeared. She could be doing anything or nothing, just reading a book upside down with her legs against the wall and he would laugh like she’d cracked a joke. Around Sarah he stopped being just a suit. ‘You kill me, Doll.’ 

‘I can do that too, Dad. Look!’ 

But unsuit-Dad was full up. ‘No one likes a show off,’ he’d say.

I gave her head lice. 

Twice.

We got older, passed stuff back and forth. Mascara. Mix tapes. Sometimes she bought my friends and I cider. One leather jacket. Dieting tips. She gave me 27 games of Shithead the night before they announced my exam results. Sterile bandages when things got too much and I tried to cut the worry out. I gave her space from Mum on come-down Sundays. She gave me my first spliff and my husband, Adam, who was her boyfriend first but I was young and thin and Fuck You then. 

Perhaps she didn’t give him to me. Perhaps I took him.

Sarah said she didn’t mind. She dyed her hair blue. Had another flirtation with dungarees. But sometimes later at family dinners I’d come into a room with only Adam and Sarah in it and she’d be playing her Dad trick. The happiness-giving. The grey-skin-sloughing. It made me envious, knowing that her secret talent was the Unclenching of Men. Perhaps he would have loved her like Dad did if I hadn’t got in the way. Perhaps, if he’d married her, Adam wouldn’t have left. 

My sister gave me my daughter. It turned out Mum and Dad only gave one of us a functioning womb, so she offered hers up because she wasn’t using it at the time. She said it like she was offering me her cowboy boots for a night. Brand new, never worn.

It was hard to watch her wobble around with her beach ball t-shirt and blue vein breasts knowing that she was carrying my baby. My body ached with it. I hid alcohol. Scrubbed surfaces with anti-bacterial spray. I wanted to lock her away from the world, from the whooping cough and rubella. Adam said I was turning into my mum. 

For a while, the three of us were a family. We whispered in awed tones about the future. We gave each other anticipation. Then, after Baby came and Adam left, me and Sarah gave each other red wine and tissues and endless watery coffee and gin and tissues and we hated each other in our same-same house with our missing love, but we poured ourselves into the tiny person who turned out to be a bit of us both. Sarah tried to rebuild the Lego-brick me without instructions, pulling her glasses onto her middle-aged nose like I was a problem she could solve. 

We got older. Our sister-love gifts got more extravagant. Cashmere jumpers. Badged handbags. Trips abroad. Finally, in an outrageous climax, we swapped organs. 

She gave me back my Lego-brick heart, fully rebuilt, devastatingly whole. 

I gave her a kidney. 

We watched as the machines cleaned her blood and pumped it through her. We took the drugs together. We lay in the same room with our sheets pulled up over our chests and our girl holding both our hands. 

‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said as they wheeled me into theatre. 

She can’t have liked all the things I gave her but she never said a thing. Even the neon scarf she wore at least once. Even the slippers that were a size too small because I forgot about her fallen arches.

Of all the gifts to reject, in the end it was this one her body returned. 

Never to be outdone, my fragile Lego heart – that she so carefully rebuilt – collapsed. Now I find myself rattling with sorrow, less than half the pair I once was.

The intentional use of style in this story is impressive. I love the way in which the repetitive resonance creates a powerful effect. I also love the exploration of the body, which adds a layer of depth and richness to the narrative.  

Mustapha Enesi

This lyrical piece encompasses an entire life in a page and a half, describing the dark and co-dependent existence of two sisters in eerie clockwork language. 

Camilla Grudova

At the Arts Council Annual General Meeting, it was decided that all of the public art that was off display and held in storage should be distributed among the population, and shown in whatever way the people saw fit. Those who wished to host artwork entered a lottery system, paying a flat rate of £10.99.

One of Monet’s waterlily studies arrived with Linda and Tony, who were ecstatic, and hung it upside down in their dining room. It could be seen from the road, and the couple would take cups of tea out to street enthusiasts, peering in through the perpetually open curtains. In the dead of night, precisely eight months into displaying it, the painting crashed to the ground. Tony had underestimated the weight of the frame and didn’t hang it properly. Neither the canvas nor their elderly dog Steve recovered from the fall.

The Digby family received a Mondrian and were devastated, they hated it. When the unmarked van had arrived and unloaded the painting, they had pleaded with the driver to give it to someone else, but even the offer of £50 wouldn’t make him budge. They left it in its wrapping on the kitchen floor and ignored it, until one night when Hugh could no longer take it, and he grabbed a sharpie and coloured in-between the lines. He later told this as an act of somnambulant vandalism, but his wife Patricia knew the truth.

The Pritchard home received a Vermeer, and proudly placed it above the mantelpiece in their living room. Mr. Pritchard didn’t like it at all, but knew that it raised his status, and saw how happy it made his wife to charge strangers money to look at a painting they knew was valuable, even if it was a bit boring and just old people from the past.

Absolutely everyone wanted a Turner, but only Bob Salmon got one, and he struggled to find the right place to put it on his narrowboat. As he waited, unable to decide, it lay flat on a shelf. His cat, Binks, liked the high sides of the frame (they made her feel safe), and she leapt onto the canvas and started using it as a bed. Initially Bob was incapacitated by anxiety, but then concluded that it was probably safer as a cat bed than on display, especially as no-one had seen him go out to meet the delivery person on the frosty towpath.

A group of students in Bristol received Tracy Emin’s ‘My Bed’ and decided that really, all art is palimpsest, and it would be an act of radical creativity if they all got in it at once and refused to get out. None of them studied art, so it came as no surprise to everyone else that they all failed that year, though they had sweetly and hubristically believed that what they were doing was bigger than the institution.

A young couple in Hackney received a full Martin Creed sound installation, which was rather large and required them to build an extension to house it. Thanks to a tip-off from a neighbour, the Council found out about the unplanned works and took them to court, and confiscated the art. Several unique screws were removed and lost, and the work can no longer be assembled.

A Spanish teacher from Crewe received a Maggi Hambling painting, and about a week later, Maggi Hambling herself showed up and set fire to his home and was last seen resisting arrest somewhere near the M6 round junction 16.

The Mallik family desperately wanted a Warhol, and instead received Hockney’s Garrowby Hill. When it arrived, Mr. Mallik was disappointed, but his eldest daughter Samira found such vibrant charm and wit in it that by the end of the year, she had moved to Kirby Underdale so that she could see the real Garrowby Hill every day. One of her friends upon coming to stay remarked that the colours of Yorkshire were nothing like Hockney’s vision, and asked Samira if she regretted her move, and Samira realised her friend didn’t understand how art feels.

Mr. Piszczek received Anish Kapoor’s Descent Into Limbo and built a special shed in his garden for it. He was mesmerised by it, the Vantablack soothed him into a state of deep meditation. He stopped going to work, all he could think of was his own private abyss. One day he crept down there and realised it was the only place he was meant to be. Aware of the licensing limitations of Vantablack, he bought a dupe online, and painted everything he could need to live down there, and then began to tunnel under the shed, expanding his subterranean void into obsidian oblivion. 

In some ways, it was a good thing that the Arts Council had raised so much money through the lottery, as they had to recompense several institutions and individuals. At least twenty works of art were destroyed, some deliberate, others defined as acts of god by the insurance company who categorically refused to pay out. More than three hundred works were missing, and several hosts too. A retired dentist from Southampton was seen exiting the English Channel and heading into open water sitting atop one of Jeff Koons balloon dogs. She had placed a flag on the tail that read ‘LIVE’, which was all that remained when the dog was seen by satellite in the Pacific Garbage Patch.  

I admire the cohesiveness of this story. The crisp sentences and vivid imagery complement each other beautifully, resulting in a fully immersive reading experience.

Mustapha Enesi

Happy Little Accidents posses a rare and often overlooked quality in fiction: an original idea in an original voice. Balancing humour with social commentary, I am looking forward to what this new author writes next!

Camilla Grudova

We are thrilled to announce our short-list for the winter Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2023.

If your story is listed, please do not identify which story belongs to you, as the judges are hard at work making their decisions.

SHORT LISTED STORIES

• 2 Albyn Place
• A taste of honey
• After that it was all downhill
• All the cunning weapons of a ninja
• Along sectarian lines 
• Baby chick flutters on the asphalt
• Bulldozer
• City rat
• Emergency contact
• End of the road
• Hands and voices
• Happy little accidents
• His newest and most pristine copy
• Honeymoon on Lake Constance with Virginia Woolf
• In all its haunting
• Love lessons from a chameleon
• Magic bloody mountain
• Mara grass
• Popman’s bin
• Roadside healing 
• Salmon
• Shipmate
• Shipping forecast
• Sound-proof room
• Starlings
• Stop-Start
• The capitalists
• The last cigarette in Los Angeles
• The price of fish
• The shark
• The things my sister gave me
• The usual 
• Thin ice
• Tiger mum

Congratulations to everyone on the list who will be awarded publication and either a year of Art & Flash workshops, or a four-week workshop called Dust Off Those Drafts with The Flash Cabin. They will get four weeks of feedback exchange and story revision (includes 20 revision exercises & 20 study stories) with Anika Carpenter.

In the next week or two, we will be announcing our winners. So watch this space! 

We have exciting news for our next competition, which will be opening on the 1 June 2023. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting.

We are thrilled to announce our long-list for the winter Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2023.

Congratulations to all of the authors who reached the list and for all those who entered this round. As always, we saw a wonderful range of experience, genres, topics and stories from all over the world and it was hugely competitive. Many wonderful stories just missed the final list and for those we have permission to email – we will be letting you know! 

If your story is listed, please do not identify which story belongs to you, as the judges are hard at work making their decisions.

LONGLISTED STORIES

• 2 Albyn Place 
• A taste of honey 
• After that it was all downhill 
• All the cunning weapons of a ninja 
• Along sectarian lines
• Baby chick flutters on the asphalt 
• Bulldozer 
• City rat 
• Emergency contact 
• End of the road
• Hands and voices 
• Happy little accidents 
• His newest and most pristine copy 
• Honeymoon on Lake Constance with Virginia Woolf 
• In all its haunting 
• Love lessons from a chameleon 
• Magic bloody mountain 
• Mara grass 
• Popman’s bin 
• Roadside healing  
• Salmon
• Shipmate 
• Shipping forecast 
• Sound-proof room 
• Starlings 
• Stop-start 
• The capitalists 
• The last cigarette in Los Angeles
• The price of fish 
• The shark 
• The things my sister gave me 
• The usual  
• Thin ice 
• Tiger mum 
• Fran’s first day at nursery 
• Needles and ink 
• Per aspera ad astra 
• Grapefruit in June 
• Splintered 
• The last tundra tour guide 
• Butter is bread 
• The magician’s assistant 
• In all the loveless places 
• Moments of intimacy eastbound

In the next week, we will be announcing our shortlist, who will be awarded publication and either a year of Art & Flash workshops, or a four-week workshop called Dust Off Those Drafts with The Flash Cabin. They will get four weeks of feedback exchange and story revision (includes 20 revision exercises & 20 study stories) with Anika Carpenter.

So watch this space! 

We have exciting news for our next competition, which will be opening on the 1 June 2023. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting.

Dad watches the crows every morning from the kitchen window. A young family has roosted in the hedgerow trees and each day they line up on the fence and scream at each other, at the sky, at the Universe, at my Dad. Dad sips his tea and glares. He knocks on the window, but the crows dance along the fence and shriek louder.

‘That fence is covered in shit,’ croaks Dad, his voice thick with sleep. The kettle boils. ‘I’ll have another one, please, love.’

I pour hot water, milk, a white flower blooming in the muddy tea.

‘And how are we this morning?’

I reach into the cupboard and finger-hunt through half-empty boxes of cereal, energy bars, pop tarts. ‘I’m hungry,’ I mutter.

Dad scuffs across the lino in his slippers, collects his tea. ‘Hi hungry, I’m Dad,’ he grins, and shuffles upstairs.

Later, he picks me up from college, shirtsleeves rolled up, blasting the Eagles.

‘Fish and chips?’ He says. We order two cod and chips, plus extra chips, drench it all in vinegar and BBQ sauce. We watch old episodes of Friends while we eat, drop our forks to clap the theme tune.

In the morning, the smeared boxes are scattered on the lawn, the greaseproof lining shredded and sprinkled on the hydrangeas. The crows squawk their gratitude. Dad bursts out the back door, arms flying, screeches their cry back at them in a horrible parody. The crows thrash their wings and scramble skyward. They return to the fence quietly, one by one, and watch as we file out to the car, flint eyes trained on us.

Dad starts the engine. ‘I’m going to kill those birds.’

I tell myself he could never catch one, and if he did, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. But more than once I catch him skulking around the hedgerow with his gardening gloves on, fingers twitching. He stands at the kitchen window and matches their stony stare with his own; mocks their rattling squall until his throat is ragged. I sit at the computer and find tabs open on bird poison, BB guns. He says the thing to do is to string one up by the feet, as a warning to the others.

I get the bus to college and leave him kneeling on the lawn, rope and netting spread out on the grass. One night I come home after a shift at the supermarket and all the lights are off, his car a slippery shadow in the driveway. I find him on the bench under the garden fence, heedless of the white crust left by the birds on every surface. A still black heap is hunched in his lap. The dark shapes of the crows guard the fence, but the garden is quiet. I tread the grass.

Dad whispers my name. ‘Look,’ he says.

I hold my breath and peer into his lap, his fists closed around wing and tail. He has done it.

‘How did you—,’

‘Shh,’ he says, and the heap of feathers stirs, flashes a hard eye, a blunt beak. Dad loosens his grip, and the bird opens the palm of its midnight wing. It stands, feathers bristling into a ragged mane. With a harsh departing ‘Caw,’ it bursts up from Dad’s lap into the sky. The air stirs as the other crows follow.

‘They’re beautiful,’ says Dad, staring after them.

This is the first day Dad skips work. He doesn’t go the next day, either. He stands in his usual spot at the kitchen window, but now, when he shrieks at the crows, it’s like he shrieks with them, not at them. He moves slowly through the house so as not to startle them. When the sun sets and they scatter back to the trees, he goes out in his dressing gown and collects their glossy feathers, fills vases and old jam jars with bouquets of them.

‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘birds are directly descended from therapods. Their bones are just the same, only smaller. Birds are the only surviving dinosaurs.’ The crows scream at this as if in applause. Dad smiles.

At college, I find myself striding down the Science corridor, seeking out a teacher to ask whether crows are dangerous or somehow addictive. But I can’t form the right words for what I want to know, so I pretend to look at the notice board and turn around.

I take more shifts at the supermarket, bring home milk and microwave lasagne. Dad stops cooking, eats only what he can fit in his hand while standing at the kitchen window. Eventually, I bring him a chair and a blanket. He loses weight, grows a beard which stretches down his neck. Angry-looking letters pile up on the doormat, but neither of us opens them.

‘Dad,’ I ask, ‘What are we going to do?’ I kneel down to him and he looks past me with dark, corvid eyes. ‘Dad?’

But Dad has stopped speaking and the only rattle left in his throat is for the crows.

One morning I come down to the kitchen and Dad isn’t there. I go to his bedroom, find his pillows strewn with opalescent feathers, and I know.In the garden, perched on the sun-warmed fence, is my Dad. He looks almost like the other crows, straight beaked, smooth headed. But his soft eyes give him away. My feet whisper across the grass. The crows side-step the fence, give me a wide berth. Dad holds my questioning stare, croaks a caw. An apology, a goodbye, or both. His wings bristle and I push out the palm of my hand, a stop sign, but it’s too late. In a thrum of wing and wind, Dad rises off the fence and heads skyward, a black knot in the clear blue sky. I watch him and wonder how the air feels underwing, the freedom whistling through his dinosaur bones. 

This blew me away, personally. It draws you into a seemingly mundane familial relationship then swells, twists, crescendos and soars like the very best writing. It also made me cry, twice. Extraordinary.

Rachel Edwards

Hard to imagine a steeper flash character arc than what happens in this piece, which one of the other judges said made her cry, twice. A depressed father, whose life is irrevocably changed by an encounter with a crow, and the narrator who is forced to witness the father’s transformation. Does the father experience a breakdown, or a liberation? By the end, we’re not completely sure, but we feel for both the father who glides away forever, and the college-age child who’s left behind, awe-struck. 

Eliot Li

I love the way the story appears to be straightforward, then veers off into a surreal place that somehow feels more real than the real. Fully engages the head and heart

Patricia Q. Bidar

The bone-flutes are restless this morning. There is no wind yet, and the reeds stand unmoving amid the dark silty water; but the flutes shift where they hang beneath the thick sheaf of the eaves, rippling with mournful notes. They’ve faded from pink to yellow as they dried – though I watered them every day with tears, at first – to white. They’re almost translucent now, and their music is gentle. More beautiful with each passing winter. I whistle softly at them until they fall silent.

Amber mist cloaks the rising sun. The same mist tickles my bare ankles, but it’s colourless down here by the water, like the steam from my chipped old cup, rose-hip-scented, warming my chilled face. 

A bird calls, far off amid the dense prickling bushes that guard the edge of the marsh. Lonely, mayhap. The bleached planks of the deck creak, some shifting a little underfoot. I chose a dry-ish spot to sit and lower myself down. My knees creak too, but I’m still able to fold my legs and tuck my bare toes under my thighs to keep them warm. 

Ma always scolded me for wandering the marsh with no shoes on.

‘Them eels’l be ticklin’ your bones with their teeth, girlie, mark my words! Don’t come a-cryin’ to me when you end up with no toes!’

I lean back against the wall of the hut and sip my tea, savouring the way the sweet-bitter brew makes my mouth water. It’ll be warmer soon. The sun is starting to burn the mist off. A hot copper-penny sizzling in the clouds. 

I rub absently at the old, round knot of scarring on the back of my left hand. Some days I must remind myself that I chose it. I could have smoothed the mark away with one of my salves, if I had wanted, after the wound healed and the infection was gone. Faded it from pink to yellow to white. But I chose to remember instead. 

The far-off bird calls again. Another answers and for a moment their songs entwine. A happy ending?

I enjoy the quiet along with another sip of tea. They’ll start to arrive soon: seekers, travellers from the villages and the towns beyond the hills. They stream into the marshes like the black rivulets that raise up through the reed beds at high tide. Everyone wants healing, remedies or advice these days. A salve, a potion. A whispered fortune. Broken hearts and broken bones mended. Business is brisk. Everyone wants to see me just once, while I’m still alive, still working. There’s a good thirty years of life left in me yet – I can feel that in my bones, the way Ma used to be able to tell, with a touch, when death was rooted in someone – but I look ancient to them. In truth, I am something ancient. The last Cunning Woman of the marshes.

Ma always warned me about this, too. 

‘You’ll end up all alone out here at this rate, girlie, mark my words!’

But I never did my duty, even though Ma tried everything she could to make me – kept on trying, right until the very end. 

I never went out there with flowers braided into my hair, holding up a smile before my fear and determination like a mask. Never laid down beneath a man for as many nights as it took, enduring, then stole away in the dark to return to the marshes when I knew my belly would swell. Never broke anyone’s heart. Nor broke the spirit of any children. Or their bones. 

And I still have all my toes. 

It’s not my bones – the thick, strong thigh bone, the elegant ulna, the filigree of the long, gnarled fingers – that hang from the eaves of my hut now, disturbing the air with their plaintive notes, tying the wind into knots as it passes through the tiny holes I carved into their lengths.

When they were new, the flutes had a harsher music. Shrill and sharp, like corvids fighting over carrion. They were never silent, never still. Oh, it was a hard winter that year. I was a woman grown, but I felt like a child, tiny and fragile and afraid as I crept around the newly quiet house, learning everything afresh, every squeak of every plank underfoot, every knot and stitch of every blanket, the chipped rim of every jar, the papery dry smells of the herbs in each basket. The frosts were as thick as snow, and set over the water with a crust like iron. Icicles sprouted from the bone-flutes then, and I flinched from their song. It followed me into my nightmares. There were times when I didn’t think I would survive, especially with my bad hand and the fever of infection that seemed to go on and on and on.

But the spring came. The swifts and swallows returned, drawing the warmth of the sun behind them like a promise. My hand healed. When I wove yellow iris and bittercress and the white stars of bogbean into my hair that summer, it was for myself, myself, myself only, and I laughed as I danced through the reed beds, barefoot. I laughed.

Time flows as smoothly as water in a life without fear. And the bone-flutes really don’t sound anything like Ma anymore. 

The bird calls a final time, its trill spinning out over the misty reeds and water. This time there is no reply. Some creatures are happier alone, mayhap.

I smile. 

The author masterfully drops the reader into an unfamiliar world. I was impressed by the use of the natural environment, the seasons, and the overall world-building here.

Patricia Q. Bidar

I love the character building here, and the voice, done in a lovely, nuanced way, this healer or witch by the marsh, who has never been in love and always been alone, and prefers it that way, with her mother her only close companion. The story took me away to another time and place altogether. I interpreted that the bone flutes were her mother’s bones, still talking to her, sharing a sort of lovely pathos with her. I love the imagery, and the metaphors—the eel, the birds calling. The harsh winter when she was on her own without her mother, that she barely survived, but then the spring came and renewed her faith in herself, and the penultimate line “Some creatures are happier alone, mayhap,” all bravely point to a life alone worth living. 

Eliot Li

An accomplished tale, one painting the dark hinterland of the central character’s experience. Mysterious and memorable.

Rachel Edwards

We are thrilled to announce our short-list for the summer Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2022. If your story is listed, please do not identify which story belongs to you, as the judges are hard at work making their decisions. We will be contacting you soon regarding our end of year anthology.

This year, our shortlist will be awarded publication in our next anthology and a four-week workshop called Dust Off Those Drafts with The Flash Cabin. They will get four weeks of feedback exchange and story revision (includes 20 revision exercises & 20 study stories) with Anika Carpenter.

SHORTLISTED STORIES

• 1974 by Veneta Roberts
• A Boy Named Blue by Judy Foot
• A Thin Line by Emily Midgley
• Aching Bones by Zoë Marriott
• All My F/a/c/e/s by Adam Brannigan
• Amy by Richard Smith
• An Orange Wool Identity by Michael Salander
• Comparative Advantage by Nancy Graham Holm
• Dinosaur Bones by Emily Ives-Keeler
• Goose by Isaura Barbé-Brown
• Gorgo Down Under by Gillian O’Shaughnessy
• How to spend more time with your father. by Kate Sass
• Let’s say by Maria Thomas
• Like Molly Ringwald in the Breakfast Club by Eleanor Luke
• My Name is Alice by Jennifer McMahon
• Perfect Petersons by Finley Hopmann
• The Anatomy of Arriving by Michelle Wong
• The Awakening by Julia Pascal
• The Kuklops by Donna L. Greenwood
• The Music Makers by Tom Vowler
• The Other People by Denny Jace
• The Poisoners Apprentice by Rowan Evans
• The Rainbow Poncho by Anna Hopwood
• Too soon, too late by Stephen Haines

Our next competition will be opening on the 1 November 2022. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting.

We are thrilled to announce our long-list for the summer Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2022.

Congratulations to all of the authors who reached the list and for all those who entered this round. We saw a wonderful range of genres, topics and stories from all over the world and it was hugely competitive. Many wonderful stories just missed the final list and for those we have permission to email – we will be letting you know! 

If your story is listed, please do not identify which story belongs to you, as the judges are hard at work making their decisions.

LONGLISTED STORIES

• 1974
• A boy named blue
• A Crossing
• A Thin Line
• Aching bones
• Across the lake
• All my faces
• Amy
• An Orange Wool Identity
• Comparative advantage
• Compost
• Dance Out Your Grief
• Darlin’ Nate
• Dinosaur bones
• Fortune’s Fool
• Four people
• Goose
• Gorgo down under
• How to spend more time with your father
• Indian smile
• Let’s say
• Life in the Meta
• Like Molly Ringwald in the Breakfast Club
• My name is Alice
• Our Unprecedented Tranquillity
• Perfect Petersons
• The Anatomy of Arriving
• The Awakening
• The Bower
• The Kuklops
• The Land Where Her Ancestors Live
• The Letter
• The Music Makers
• The Other People
• The Plan
• The Poisoners Apprentice
• The Rainbow Poncho
• Timing
• Too Soon, Too Late

In the next few weeks, we will be announcing our shortlist, who will be awarded publication in our next anthology and a four-week workshop called Dust Off Those Drafts with The Flash Cabin. They will get four weeks of feedback exchange and story revision (includes 20 revision exercises & 20 study stories) with Anika Carpenter.

So watch this space! 

Our next competition will be opening on the 1 November 2022. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting.

Kiki learns that male alligators have permanent erections while she watches the Discovery Channel instead of grading five paragraph essays from her eighth graders who, among the boys, she also suspects have permanent erections. Over the many years she’s taught, she’s seen hundreds of boys adjust themselves, eyes darting around the room, checking to see if anyone noticed, or openly, without a hint of embarrassment. She has also on occasion watched a boy walk out of her classroom with a full-on tent and the mother in her has wanted to rush over and hand him a folder or a book to cover himself. Which, of course, she resists. Kiki should turn off the television and grade, but she just can’t bring herself to read another essay about The Hate You Give, a book she and her students love. Reading and discussing books with her students brings Kiki actual joy. Reading their writing is another beast altogether.  

During mating, two flatworms, which Kiki has never heard of, engage in “penis fencing” in which they each try to stab each other with their two-headed penises. Yes, this is alarming and surprising to Kiki, but what really gets her, is the way the Discovery Channel describes what comes next, which is that whoever manages to penetrate first and inseminate the other wins. And the loser, their words, not hers, becomes the de facto mother. Kiki considers the flatworm’s hermaphroditic nature, what it might be like to have a penis alongside her vagina. Not interested. While she’s had her share of penises inside of her, sleeps beside a human with a penis, and has a child with a penis, she will always find them strange, and somewhat ugly. She realizes that if a man described a vagina this way, it would be viewed as misogynistic. Maybe she’s biased, but vaginas just seem more organic to the human body. 

Kiki glances at the stack of essays beside her on the couch and feels slightly nauseated. She tells herself that it’s because there’s eighty of them, but also, her period is a couple of weeks late and she’s been putting off buying a pregnancy test. Kiki loves her son, but she is not interested in having another baby—she hated being pregnant, and she’s only ever wanted a single child. Lucas, her husband, is another story. “Two is perfect,” he keeps telling her. “Then they have each other.” Kiki won’t budge—even when they were dating, she made it clear that if she had children, it would only be one. Anders is four, a sweet, gentle little boy who loves animals and has the palate of an adult. She loves him more than anything in the world, which is why she only ever wanted one child. How could she possibly love another child as much as she loves Anders? 

On television, a hen squawks and does its strange head-bobbing run across a farmyard, a fat rooster in hot pursuit. Kiki watches as the rooster, who, just for the record, seems both predatory and peremptory, mounts the hen. She knows she’s anthropomorphizing, and the rooster is just following his biological urges, but watching him mount that hen makes her mad. Some of that anger dissipates when the Aussie host of the show shares that a hen can eject up to eighty percent of an offending (again, their words, not hers) male’s sperm. She silently cheers on the hen, eject, eject, eject! Once again, the Discovery Channel disappoints when it underscores that this ejection of sperm allows for the possibility that the hen might be impregnated by a rooster at the top of the pecking order. Is it so impossible that a hen just doesn’t want to get impregnated yet again? The TV host did, after all, describe hens who eject sperm as enraged or possibly disappointed. Why assume she’s disappointed the rooster isn’t distinguished enough—too low in the pecking order? Why not focus on the possibility that the hen is enraged at the rooster’s audacity, at the prospect of laying another bunch of eggs, with the idea of being, yet again, an incubator? 

Kiki clicks off the television and puts aside her stack of essays. She slings her purse over her shoulder and grabs her keys. At the pharmacy down the street, she selects two pregnancy tests. Sitting awkwardly on the toilet, trying to pee on the stick but not her hand—harder than it might sound—Kiki thinks about the flatworms, wonders if her husband would be so gung-ho about two kids if he lost their battle and became the de-facto mother. 

The best flash rage on the page, and that’s what’s happening here. A rage against silence and men. Done so with wit, grace, and searing language. What’s so stunning about this piece is how the contempt is palatable on the page, which, just like a flatworm, digs more and more into you as you read. Nothing short of a delight.

jj Peña

The story was very cleverly structured. There were so many layers to it, and so many underlying emotions to what seemed like a very simple observation of a particular situation. I loved the voice, the structure and how it evoked all kinds of emotions in me while I was reading it.

Susmita Bhattacharya