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

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

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. 

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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

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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

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Yasmina Din Madden is a Vietnamese American writer who lives in Iowa. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Idaho Review, PANK, Carve, The Masters Review: New Voices, The Fairy Tale Review, Necessary Fiction, Hobart, Word Riot and other journals. Her short fiction has been a finalist for The Iowa Review Award in Fiction, The Masters Review Anthology, the Wigleaf Top 50, Fractured Journal’s micro-fiction contest, and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She is completing a collection of short fiction.

 

The day of the disappearance smells of citrus air freshener. Jimmy is nine. His younger sister, Clara, who likes to be the centre of attention, throws up on the way to the theatre and they are late taking their seats. The show is a magic show. The magician pulls a bunny from a hat, transforms an onion into a chocolate egg. When he asks for a volunteer, Jimmy’s mum pushes him to his feet.

At a dinner party when Jimmy is seven, the grown-ups are being loud as if the volume dial on their voices is turned up to a hundred. Jimmy is at the table being seen and not heard. He wishes he could be neither seen nor heard playing Tetris on his Amstrad computer. The grown-ups have acquired loud gestures to accompany their loud words. Uncle Tom, who is a friend-of-the-family uncle rather than a biological uncle, topples his red wine across the white tablecloth. Jimmy’s mum reacts in a heartbeat – ‘Smother it with salt.’

He is eighteen. It is happy hour at The Headless Hippo. Everyone from his corridor in halls is crowded around a small table and they are at the point of sharing secrets and showing off. A round has been bought – shots of Jägermeister. Jimmy upends his shot glass into a plant pot because he doesn’t need alcohol to make them stare like they stare at the guy who trips on a pool cue and smashes his head against the bar.

He has to draw his face in Year 8 art. Mr Ozaki takes Jimmy’s picture on a digital camera and Jimmy divides the print-out into 1cm squares, copies each square onto his sketchpad. His nose is two squares long. His forehead is five squares wide. His port-stain birthmark that sludges up from his neck across his cheek is three squares by six squares, even though he has angled his face to make it as small as possible. At the end of the lesson, Mr Ozaki insists everyone gather around to admire the quality of his work. They press in behind him and there is a snort, a sniggering. Jimmy feels a pulsing in his throat.

The day after he disappears, what he remembers most vividly is the pinch of salt the magician threw over his left shoulder and the swaying of his pocket watch. ‘Three, two, one – you’re under.’ He was inside a game of Tetris and he was broken into shapes. His left leg was an orange L. His stomach was a yellow square. It felt unusual to be broken up in this way, but not unfamiliar. His brain fizzed like 7Up at no longer being tethered to his face.

He is back from university for the Christmas holidays. Clara has a boyfriend with a Mazda MX-5. ‘Haven’t you got a girlfriend yet?’ asks Uncle Tom who is there because their dad says no one should be alone for Christmas. He has brought Châteauneuf du Pape. Over Christmas dinner, Clara asks, ‘Do you remember when you disappeared?’ Jimmy says he doesn’t, even though he thinks about that sensation of disappearing almost every day. Clara says, ‘We’ve got it on video.’ Uncle Tom says, ‘I have to see this.’ Jimmy excuses himself to his room because he has watched the video before and he has hated it, the way the audience gawps as he trudges past, the crackle of their laughter when the magician puts him under. He has hated it, hated it, hated it, right up until the point when he is no longer there, when the place where he was standing has become a perfect void.

On his tenth birthday, he steals a drum of Saxa salt from the local shop. Later that night, he stands in front of the bathroom mirror and mixes the salt with flour and water to make a paste. He dabs it on his cheek, around the edges of his birthmark, rubs a thin veil on top. He scoops it up. He smears it on. He pats it down until the salt paste covers everything. When he is done, he swivels his neck and, for a brief moment, he is satisfied. Then he peers deeper into the mirror, right into its depths, his face closer and closer to its shiny surface, and all of a sudden, his nose looks odd and his jaw is wrong, and he can still feel the birthmark, the whole burning lake of it, buried beneath the salt. 

For perhaps the seventeenth time, he tries to replicate the disappearance. He sprays his room with citrus air freshener before positioning himself in front of the mirror and closing his eyes. He has a pinch of salt in his right hand, which he throws over his left shoulder. He says ‘Abracadabra’ imploringly beneath his breath. There is a state of drifting he remembers from the day he disappeared and he tries to conjure it, hears the magician’s voice counting down from three. It is working – he tries to convince himself it is working. He will lean forward and fall through the mirror. He will be floating. He will be in that Tetris dimension again, all the parts of him untethered as brightly coloured shapes.

 

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Very poignant and full of emotional resonance. I loved the imagery and how it evoked all the senses and made me really feel for the main character.

Susmita Bhattacharya

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Perhaps the real magic of this piece is in how it leaves you feeling—waiting, wishing for enchantment. The language is so rich and vivid, constantly returning to the wound of being, of appearing. And just like a prayer or a spell, it repeats itself over and over again, until you also find yourself doing it. 

jj Peña

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Matt Kendrick is a writer, editor and creative writing teacher based in the East Midlands, UK. His stories have been published in Bath Flash Fiction, Cheap Pop, Craft Literary, Fictive Dream, FlashBack Fiction, Reflex Fiction, and elsewhere.

I know you people think all dolphins are great, but believe me, Meg is a straight up asshole. I should know. I have to work with her every goddam day, swimming around this shitty lagoon in Key Largo, rickshawing tourists on our backs for two minutes a pop. Meg is a total fucking sell-out collaborator. It’s dolphins like her that keep the rest of us down.

See, I think most people wouldn’t keep this whole animals-as-servants system going if they knew how much we hated it. That’s exactly why I tried to organize a little wildcat strike last year. The plan was to get us all to stop mid-ride and take our passengers under for a few seconds—not enough to hurt anyone, but just to make it clear that we’re not down with this whole situation. We needed solidarity for the plan to work though, and of course Meg wasn’t on board. She’s a company girl. 

When she said she wouldn’t do it, I almost whacked my tail into that fucked-up snout of hers. Charles held me back. It’s her ace, that crooked mouth. It doesn’t quite close, so it makes her look like she’s always smiling. That’s why she’s the favorite. Our handlers always have her do the introductory lap when people come in the lagoon because she makes it seem like we’re all so goddam happy to be here. Total bullshit. 

And Meg takes advantage of her status. She gets first dibs on who she’ll carry because after that welcome lap, she’s allowed to go over and wait by whichever person she wants. Charles and I get stuck with the leftovers. Charles is a dumbass, so he doesn’t care, but it pisses me off every time because I understand how clever Meg is. She knows people. She can see into them. And it’s not just the embryos and the tumors and the broken bones she sees—we all can do that. Meg actually looks into their souls. She somehow can spot and avoid those super-clingy riders, the ones who pay to swim with a dolphin because they don’t have enough love in their life or something. It took me a long time to figure out that the hardest rides to give aren’t about the size or weight of the passenger—they’re about longing. And Meg always leaves those longing-ass motherfuckers for us. It’s like she’s got a seventh sense or something.

I thought I had finally gotten the best of her one day last month. Charles was getting examined by the veterinarians, so it was just me and Meg. They put two morons in the lagoon right at the edge, a man and a woman. I spotted the woman’s cancer before Meg did. The lady’s insides were completely full, and I know those sick ones are the absolute worst. They are needy-times-ten, living out their bucket list, gripping you heavily as they try to look deeply into your eyes. I always feel like they’re pulling me to the bottom with them, and I wanted no part of it with this woman. Before the trainer could whistle for Meg’s parade lap, I hightailed it over to the man, cutting in front of Meg.

The trainers got the guy latched on to me and then they got the woman on Meg and we started the ride. I laughed to myself for the whole two minutes, even though Meg didn’t seem to be having a particularly hard time. I figured maybe the woman was Buddhist or something and at peace with her own impending doom. 

When the ride was over, I dropped my guy and swam away, but Meg wouldn’t let the woman out of the water. The lady had let go of Meg’s dorsal and was hanging on to the edge, but instead of swimming away, Meg had turned around and just kept nuzzling the woman’s belly with her janky-ass snout. I thought Meg was just trying to be cute, angling for more fish, but when she gave me the side eye, I should have known she was playing three-dimensional chess while I was playing checkers. 

The trainer finally pulled Meg off and gave his usual spiel to the lady about how dolphins are like swimming MRIs. He told her about the time one of our colleagues kept poking at the wife of a newly married couple until the bride finally had to admit she was pregnant and hadn’t yet told her husband. 

The trainer told Meg’s passenger that she should go get an ultrasound, just in case, a line which usually gets a laugh from women in their fifties. This time he got crickets. The couple didn’t say a word, just looked at each other. I figured they were too polite to tell the trainer that the woman was dying because it would have made him feel like the shithead he actually is. But I was completely wrong. 

This morning, the couple came back with TV cameras and everything. Turned out, they hadn’t known about the tumors, but because of one terrific dolphin, it looks like they caught the cancer in time. Everyone’s making a huge deal about what a hero Meg is and about the special bond between our two species. 

Special bond, my ass. 

Meg is over by the side of the lagoon, and they’re filming her doing stupid tricks and letting Tumor Woman pet her and give her kisses. She’s getting a boatload of extra fish for it, and Charles is hanging around, hoping for some scraps. 

And me? I’m just swimming circles at the far end, trying to plot my fucking escape.

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Devious. Refreshing. Snarky. And, above all else, FUN. Humor isn’t always nuanced but it is here, and you simply cannot wait to follow more devilish dolphin adventures. 

jj Peña

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Loved the candid voice of the dolphin! It was surprising, funny and I found the point of view refreshing. It’s not easy to do ‘funny’ in flash and I thought this piece achieved it nicely!

Susmita Bhattacharya

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Jeremy Glazer is a writer and educator. His fiction has appeared in Tablet, Bellevue Literary Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and on the public radio program WLRN Under the Sun. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Rowan University. He’s working on a collection of short stories in and around schools.

 

As soon as my fuddled brain tasted the stale alcohol of the beer, the sirens began. They screamed one long note, which tore the silence of the night apart.

I sat still, head half-cocked, listening. As usual Dad’s pub was full to bursting with locals who had all been dancing and singing to high heavens, but somehow the air siren had broken through and silenced them.

They stood like statues before dashing out as fast as they could. Dad and I watched them go, before turning back to what we were doing, him cleaning the bar; me drinking my pint.

I had wanted to drown my sorrows and forget about death for tonight. But when I was still halfway through my pint, the door was unexpectedly wrenched open.

A woman came bursting in, breathless and red in the face, eyes searching wildly.

She was hunched over and under her robes I could make out a great lump on her back. ‘Please.’ She wheezed. ‘I need a midwife!’

Dad and I looked at each other. ‘Our Jen here is a midwife,’ he said, eventually.

‘Please.’ The old woman pulled at me with her claws, ‘You must come, my niece needs help.’

‘Now hang on Missus.’ Dad said raising his dirty paw. ‘Yeh can’t just take her out there.

‘No Dad, it’s fine.’

He still protested as we made it out of the pub. The old dear took me through the streets without so much as an upward glance at the sky, as if she isn’t aware of the approaching planes and their bombs.

It’s funny, I thought I knew these streets inside out, but as I followed her, we went through alleyways and side streets I didn’t recognise. Eventually, when I decided that I was completely lost when she stopped in front of a slum. Or at least I assumed it was a slum. The house was big enough to have once been owned by one of the swanks of the city. However, it looked so old now it was practically falling down. Boards were propping it up and when she pulled me inside, I could still hear even over the noise, the house creak deeply.

There were about a dozen of them in there. All women, all old and all hunched over with great lumps on their backs. They were all anxiously crowding around a woman lying in the middle of the room. Just one look at her and I knew she was in the advanced stages of labour, given how weakly she cried out and how red and sticky her face was. I paused in the doorway, marvelling how old she looked despite her condition.

One of the women yanked me over, and began to beg I help her. ‘It’s stuck!’ Another said, ‘we think it’s stuck!’

My brain was still muddled from the alcohol and the bazar situation. I started to slowly feel her swollen grey belly and then check her birth canal to see how much progress had been made.

While I was doing this, the mother began to groan and complain. ‘Another one! They’re coming again! I can’t lie here. Help, please unbound me! I need to be off my back!’

What happened next, I will never forget.

Two of the women pulled up the mother and began to unbind something on her back. At first, I heard only the gentlest of rustling, like a mouse nesting in straw. And then with a swoosh they were free. Two enormous pearl grey wings, which arched and swooped in the air before settling around the mother’s back. She groaned again, this time from relief.

I could only stare at the wings, completely dumb with wonder at them. I never knew, never thought, that something like this could ever exist.

One of the older women yelled at me to hurry. Another contraction was coming, and it was clear now the baby was indeed stuck. I began to search frantically for my pliers in my medical bag, however, when I tried to pull the baby out, I couldn’t get a purchase on the body. I had to use my hands. I pushed them inside her, searching blindly for a head. A slippery object met me, half in and half out of its mother. My fingers slipped twice but then, by some miracle, I got a hold of it and pulled it free.

The world was silent as I looked at the grey thing in my hands. An egg? One of the women snatched it from me and gave it to the mother, who laughed and cried as she held it. ‘Thank you, oh thank you.’ She breathed.

A cheer erupted in the room. The women laughed and danced and hugged me while I stood stunned, my eyes never leaving the egg.

We ought to have been listening. We should have heard the plane above us. We didn’t hear the bomb fall down on us, but I felt it when the ceiling fell in, only just realising what had happened as ancient bricks and plaster rained down on us.

I don’t know how I was able to wake up but somehow, I did. I blinked the dust away from my eyes as I sat up. The house was gone, flattened by the bomb. I sat up weakly, scattering bricks and, I realised sickeningly, body parts of the women too, including their beautiful wings.

I stood up and at once became aware of the noise. A gargled kind of shriek. I pulled myself over and found the egg. The shell had cracked from the impact so that I could see in the grey dawn light the baby within.

It wailed at me, like every other baby I had helped bring into the world. 

I reached over and held it in my arms. I picked a fragment of shell from its cheek before slowly looking up at the sky.

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Not many stories have tenderness, heart—and you wouldn’t expect to see this in a flash about a winged woman giving birth to an egg, But it’s there—in the chaos of war. And the descriptions are dazzling, focusing on transforming the “other” into something beautiful and mythic, in something worth saving.

jj Peña

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Great imagery and I loved the haunting atmosphere, a sense of unease. Loved how all the events unfolded to the unexpected ending.

Susmita Bhattacharya

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Sophie Kendall loves to write stories but has never felt brave enough to try and get one of them published. Her parents instilled in her a love of reading, and she was able to study creative writing at university for three wonderful years.