We are thrilled to announce our short-list for the winter 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.

SHORT LISTED STORIES

Next week, we will be announcing our winners. So watch this space! 

Our next competition 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 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. We will be contacting you soon regarding our end of year anthology.

LONGLISTED STORIES

In the next few weeks, we will be announcing our shortlist and then our winners.

So watch this space! 

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

Mam wants a mermaid instead of me and though I slip out of her like a fish in the birthing pool on a rainy day, I have no tail or scales, and I do not smell of the sea, and when Pa tries to give her this squalling too-many-limbed me, she tells him ‘Some cactuses don’t grow towards the light,’ but she doesn’t mind when I’m swaddled and even though she’s not got baby shoes or any clothes with legs, she does not go out to buy them and keeps me zipped up like a clam in sleeping-bag suits or wraps me in layers of long seaweed coloured shifts and smocks she ties with twine, and tells me ‘Scales are like if cactus spines were flat, or umbrellas closed when there’s no rain,’ and she does not encourage me to walk, so I sit with her as she tells me of her dream of Pa and her dancing on the boardwalk at Coney Island and she sings, ‘Somewhere beyond the sea…’ or I lie on my back or belly to slide across the floor, legs lost in the folds that follow, or I ride on Pa’s old skateboard with the scull and crossbones, a knot to stop hems getting caught, and I sail out the back door and down the garden path, like a minnow on a stream, and she calls me Guppy, Betta, or Angelfish and when she’s angry Sprat, and when the time comes for me to start nursery she puts it off, saying she doesn’t want to be left like a lone cactus on a dessert shore, me gone in the morning, Pa gone to security work at night and asleep in the day, until he comes to say goodbye to me out back, and stands in sunlight at the garden fence, hand over one eye to see, turning it into a telescope, to say ‘I spy a mermaid swimming in the bluebell sea,’ a bottle hanging from his other hand, uisce beatha, the water of life, company on the boat at night, that harbours the pirate radio-station, that Mam listens to, out of reach of the Gardai, the guardians of the peace, and when Pa’s gone Mam goes on the phone, requesting songs, laughing like she’s never done with Pa and waves from the bedroom window, the mermaid tail cactus he gave her on the sill and she looks past the field I’m in and down the hill to the sea, and the wind picks up, the net curtains fill like sail, and the air carries words of hers, like ‘freedom’, ‘escape’ and ‘yes’ and the wind vane turns and the white net curtain with it, to slap across Mam’s body and shroud her face, a ghost now standing in the window, as if all that’s left of her is the mermaid tail, and as I watch, I feel the bluebell sap stick my toes together, and I lie back in the grass and by my face in the bluebell sky hangs the first moon daisy which I pick and pluck the petals from to confirm I should spend that summer, weaving a mermaids tail from dried seaweed, seagrass, long grass and weeds to hide in the shed, to show Mam when we come home, from her first day of work and mine of school, where I spend the hours kicking off my shoes, the teacher complaining about spills and falls and other children copying me, until the floor is littered with shoes and he tells me to pick up every one and return them, and I do, to the fish tank that has lost its fish and watch the shoes swim, laces flailing in the bubbles coming from the fake plastic treasure chest, and Mam has to come from the canning factory to pick me up, smelling of sardines and oil, and says, ‘There are twenty-one species of fish called sardine,’ and asks why can’t I be one, as she lifts me up from the chair I was told to wait on, wrapping my duffle coat round my bare legs and feet, as she takes me to the car, and says, ‘The sea urchin cactus only wakes at sunset,’ and straps me in the front passenger seat and we drive, I can’t see where, but it’s not home, and the radio plays ‘This is the sea’ by the Water Boys and I fall asleep and wake in quiet until Mam’s car door opens to let in the sound of the seagulls and sea and closes, and I slip out of the seat belt and up on my knees to lean on the warm dashboard, and watch through the windscreen, what she calls cactus clouds with little pricks of rain, roll in, as she disappears as if she was never there, into the sea, the rain making the glass between us a blur, and I switch on the radio, the orange light of the dial like a little sunset in the dark of the car and I remember the sea urchin cactus Mam said only woke at sunset as I listen to the presenter announce a special request, from The Last Pirate to his treasures at home and ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’ plays and dovetails into the traditional Irish song, ‘Óró, sé do bheatha abhaile’, O row, you are welcome home, making my neck prickle, and still leaning on the now cold dashboard, the skin on my arms goose-pimples and my legs go numb, as I wait for Mam to come out of the sea.  

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I found this piece outstanding. The final image of the child at the ‘now cold dashboard’ stayed with me – I loved the push of the pace, the lyrical language and structure, the child’s view layered over the lives of the parents; the way the mother’s condition surfaces almost as though it were revealed by the sea, with intricate, telling detail. A rhythm and crescendo that felt like a sea-swept dirge.

Catherine McNamara

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The voice is immediate and intimate. The language is lush. The pace is breathless. It rewards re-reading.

Adam Lowe

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Wonderfully poetic and evocative and with great detail and atmosphere.  Strong voice and emotional resonance.

Dr Clare Morgan

Rosaleen Lynch is an Irish community worker and writer in the East End of London with words in lots of lovely places and can be found on Twitter @quotes_52 and 52Quotes.blogspot.com. 

 

In the beginning it was just you and me. Perhaps just me, from my perspective. You were the extension that was warm and singing. You were black hair and green eyes. 

At first, we were in the back room of the old Victorian house. You fed me in bed against the red wall, illuminated by the last of the evening sun. I was small, I was yours. 

You carried me to school, held me to your chest zipped up in your jacket like a baby bird. We walked up the big hill and chattered to one another over buses and cars and the sounds of the city. You dropped me off and I became one of them, in amongst it all, until I could leave. 

One day you gave me your cardigan to hold, to stop the tears. I smelt it for the rest of the journey. Soon after, it faded. You became a voice on the phone. You said you loved me infinity times a million. I sat on the stairs and tried to remember your smell. 

You had gone there to set things up. Far far away. You were finding work and a house. 

I was painting my nails glitter green and listening to techno with the au pair. Paloma. She shaved off her red curls and died the stubble blue. Paloma. Wild and young. She loved me and you weren’t there, so I drank it up. Paloma. We bathed together. She ran naked into the sea. 

Later, I was colouring in with the welfare officer, answering questions. She sat me down, handed me the paper. Draw a line, she said, fill the page with it. Then we coloured it in. Whilst I was reaching for pencils, trying to keep within the lines, she made me a little informant. It was fed back. 

Around that time, you came back to the city. To court. To answer questions. Then you won. 

We were suddenly in the silence. In the moon and stars and lambs in the fields. There was space then. You gave me my own room and we made friends at the church. Squeaky clean friends who shared their sweets. They were the parallel universe us: Irish parents, still together. I was small and grubby, faulty somehow. Loosened stitches and misshapen on a forgotten corner of the toy-shelf. Alone in a dark wood, overlooking a ravine. The sweets made me sick. 

Years passed. You worked all day and then the evenings. You lost your dad. You became quiet. Then withdrew. Piece by piece. 

Your eyes were veiled with cataracts of thought. 

Once a double-glazing salesman came over. You were his dream, vacant and looking for instant gratification. I sat with you on the threadbare sofa in the front room, cold in the blue light of winter, and listened to the pitch. He was right. He understood you. You did want us to be warm; you did want to spend less, eventually; you did want to do something that might help with the damp, the creeping black in the top corners of the rooms. He was bursting out of his buttons, eyeing me cautiously each time I said I wasn’t sure you had to decide right now, laughing and joking that I was a little adult already. You signed the papers. 

Darkness slipped in after that, more and more. You were barely there. You ploughed, unseeing, through pensioners in the street. They looked back at you disgusted or shocked, but you were somewhere else entirely and no-one could come with you. Panic fluttered around the edges of the house. I watched you in high alert, then sloped off to the woods to get high with the glow worms. 

You went off sick.

It was a different kind of space then. The sun came back. 

In the mornings, you were home in the kitchen drinking coffee, listening to the radio. Unfurling. You told me about your childhood and cycling your Hi Ho Silver. You cried about your dad. 

We went to Barcelona, just you and me again. You got the dates wrong and I missed school, but we saw moonscapes and buses with standard lamps on, so it didn’t matter. We walked everywhere and drew everything and you talked. And listened. A little window. 

At eighteen, I left. You took me and we drove all the way with my life in the boot. I came back less and less, moved further away. When I remembered, I called you. From airports, from mountains, from ancient neon cities. Standing at phone booths, I touched number pads greasy from other fingers, and burnt under the sun of a different hemisphere as I filled you in. Sometimes you struggled to hear me over the racket of cicadas, or the fragments of strangers. I became the voice on the phone. And as time went on, I left bigger gaps in between.

Sometimes, at night, I think wild birds have been let loose in the house. Their heavy wings batter through the rooms until they rest messy in my rafters. I open the window to let in the air. The sky is indigo twilight. Flaming balls of orange ignite one by one. I see you. Small, white hair, green eyes. You look keenly around, taking everything in. You draw the sea. I’m glad you’re here, I want to say. 

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Very strong, evocative, fine emotional detail, sense of complete life and emotional trajectory. Compressed but fully ‘there’. 

Dr Clare Morgan

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A story told with tender detail, and an awareness of the spaces between people that extends through time. Fluid and touching language, a remarkable voice. 

Catherine McNamara

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The last paragraph is what sealed it for me. It’s an almost magical realist relinquishing of the world that had been carefully built up so far, as if blurring like a mirage of memory.

Adam Lowe

Lydia is an emerging writer and illustrator, brought up in Cornwall and now based in a small, coastal town in the South-East. She is currently working on her first novel. Through writing and illustration, she explores memory and place.

 

They used to laugh about it before they went on. It was their warm-up and lucky routine.

She’d be contorting herself in some corner near the plug socket, coaxing her hair to twice its volume with a hot wand, and he’d take his wand out of its case and with a white, black, white wave over his baldness, command, ‘Abracadabra, give me a full head of curls.’ 

She’d wait a couple of beats before saying, ‘Not working, love. You tried putting a plug on it?’

She hadn’t minded how scruffy the dressing rooms were, although she didn’t like it so much when they had to share with other acts. Some of the men … well … you wouldn’t take your coat off in front of them. She kept hoping he’d tell everyone to get lost for half an hour while she changed, but it was always her heading to the loo with her frock and tiara.

‘You’ve been getting sawn in half for five years,’ he’d say. ‘How hard can it be to wrestle yourself into a dress in the toilet cubicle?’ 

Those were the glory days – she understands that now. She was in love with him and with standing on a stage and waiting for the curtains to draw back. She felt drunk on the sound of the applause; hugged by the warm lights. 

She could read the signs of a shiny, bright future in the way the rhinestones on her bodice sparkled; how he seemed broader and taller in his suit. 

‘Did you see that audience?’ he’d say, as they came off stage. ‘Had them in the palm of my hand – open mouthed, eyes out on stalks. And that ‘Ooh’ when I chopped open the apple and the diamond ring fell out. We can go all the way, I’m telling you. All the way.’

She didn’t mention the teenagers who looked bored; the old guy having a kip at the back of the stalls.

Now and again, she’d ask if she could do a couple of the tricks herself; she knew them well enough.

‘It’ll just confuse the punters,’ he said. ‘Let me do the magic. You do the pretty.’

Most of the time she didn’t mind. She loved to watch his hands when he was working; the graceful flourishes and spins. The shuffles and mis-direction. Funny really, because at home anything that called for dexterity, he struggled with – painting the skirting board without getting gloss on the wall; knocking in a nail. 

Touching her exactly how she liked to be touched.

On stage though, like a fish in water or a bird in the sky, he was in his element. A Master of Illusion. 

Rope tricks, coins pulled from amazed ears, levitation, the lady sawn in half, and, for the climax, two doves conjured out of a burning pan. 

He loved those doves. He’d coax them from their cage to perch on his finger. Blew gently on their breast feathers. Insisted on feeding them by hand.

‘If I was the jealous type …’ she’d say and pretend it was a joke because it was easier than thinking about how hard he could be on her if she missed a cue, or put on a few extra pounds.

The venues got smaller and the digs, shoddier. Their names slid down the bill. They were beaten in TV-inspired talent shows by young kids with unreliable voices, but tear-inducing back stories.

One night they went on before a troupe of male strippers and he came off stage fuming at the stuff the women had shouted at him. 

‘It’s just a bit of fun,’ she said in the dressing room and he pushed her so hard she stumbled and turned her ankle. In A&E he entertained the nurses by pulling cotton wool balls from their ears. 

She went back to working full-time and he diversified into children’s parties. Gave it up after their own kids were born because he didn’t have the patience – it was only a matter of time before a birthday boy or girl got backhanded.

She realised it was curtain down, lights out when she found the dove cage out in the wheelie bin. 

‘Where are the doves?’ she’d asked, but he didn’t answer.

Now she’s the one conjuring up illusions. 

She holds his hand when they are out together. Smiles at her mother and tells her everything is fine. 

Pulls the wand from the tube of concealer and dabs it on her bruises. Makes them disappear before the kids wake up.

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An unusual take on the waning of love and the ugliness of domestic violence, conveyed using lucid language and a skilfully conceived voice. The setting is beautifully balanced, with delicious detail serving to heighten the plight of the main character.

Catherine McNamara

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Illusions and performance jostle against the crashing reality of domestic violence. Well wrought and realised.

Adam Lowe

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Trajectory of an abusive relationship well evoked and the deterioration delicately done. Characters and situation come across fully. Pace and interest kept up, and the psychology sound.

Dr Clare Morgan

Hazel writes short stories, flash fiction and has had four romantic comedies published by Quercus. Her flash fiction has been shortlisted and longlisted in the Bath Flash Fiction Award and shortlisted in the Hastings Literary Festival.

 

Autumn 1901

The axes, saws and chains came that autumn. I was only 82 years old then. They cleared the land to build the house, removing the woodland around me with indecent haste. The sounds of the crashing branches as they felled my family haunt me still. Then, they stopped, and left me, a lone specimen marking the boundary between the lawned garden and the landscape beyond. 

I miss my siblings. I miss the competition to see who could grow tall enough to touch the sky and the feel of our roots mingling in the Kentish sandy soil. I learned to listen to the song of the trees from far away across the downs; the low undertones of the oaks and the sweet murmurings of the willows.

Summer 1902 

First I heard chatter and laughter from the house, then it came from the terrace getting closer each day. Suddenly he was by my side, tilting his curious face up towards my crown. ‘I am six’ he announced, ‘how old are you?’ Unexpectedly he wrapped his arms as far as they would reach around my trunk, pressing himself close against my mottled trunk. Taking care to mark the furthest spot with his fingertips he circled around me, repeating this manoeuvre three more times to measure my full circumference. Then he ran off, zigzagging across the lawn. 

No human had ever touched me before. I was accustomed to the squirrels scittering along my branches and the fluttering finches stealing my papery seeds, but this was exquisitely different. Over the next few days the boy returned, exploring my pleated leaves and delicately investigating my twisted bark.  

‘Stanley Michael Edward Dunmore! You come back here this very instant!’ the female in a long black skirt and lacey shirt shouted from the terrace. That was the first time he climbed up along my branches, pressing his back securely against my trunk. He stifled his giggling laugh so as not to give his location away. They could not find him, it was as if he had just disappeared.

Summer 1911

He was lying in a deckchair on the lawn, his arms folded, with a book shading his eyes from the ardent sun. He had grown into a tall, thin sapling, his hair now darkened to sandy brown. In the stillness of summer we both dozed and breathed deeply the shimmering air.

Winter 1914 

I had seen many winters but few felt as bleak as this, after days of ceaseless rain, the temperature dropped, bringing fitful snow flurries. He stood at the window, watching, waiting. We heard the men marching up the lane on their way to the docks We felt their boots stomping the ground like a pulse ebbing away.

Summer 1915 

We were so proud of him dressed in his uniform. His sister took photographs on the lawn. He stood tall and let my shadow rest gentle across his shoulder.

Spring 1916 

On those few precious days when he was home on leave, he would go out early and walk for hours; trying to muster peaceful sleep through exhaustion. I wanted to cradle him on my beams and hide him, but most days he would just pass me by. Finally, on that last morning, he climbed up into my branches once more. His khaki green drab amongst my fresh furled leaves. I knew he would look for my fellow hornbeams in France and that their familiar shape would give him comfort and protection if they could. He pulled a button from his tunic and placed it in the crook one of my branches.

Summer 1916 

The sounds of the guns grew louder from across the water and the murmurs of the petrified trees retreated as they were shattered and scattered by the artillery. 

After the telegram boy cycled away, I could hear the heartbreak spilling through the open terrace doors. It flowed across the lawn and down into my roots. I lashed my branches, whipping them around, flinging my accusations through the air towards the hornbeams of Delville Wood. The sighs came back on the wind like sobbing waves, ‘We fell, they fell. We fell, they fell.’ 

They could not find him. It was as if he had just disappeared. 

Spring 1962

She was a curious looking creature in flared trousers and a knitted waistcoat. She ran through the low gate at the edge of the lawn, letting it slap shut behind her. She hardly paused before reaching up to my lower branches, wedging her plimsoled feet against my trunk and pulling herself up. When she planted her small hands on my rough bark, I knew she would be the one. She settled high enough to be hidden from view under my crisp canopy.  

I could hear her Grandmother calling to her from the terrace. The girl found the button as she was climbing down. ‘Look Granny. Look what I found.’ The old woman peered at the blackened disc in the child’s hand. She recognised the insignia.

‘That belonged to my brother. The soldier in the photographs. He was lost, at Delville Wood, on the Somme. ’

Summer 1984

When she grew up, the little girl kept the promise I heard her make to her Granny that day; to find the boy who had first climbed the tree and mark his resting place. I knew that the naked trees had fallen in on him, as I had begged them to, protecting his lifeless body from further desecration by the relentless shells, but I never dreamed that it would take so long for them to find him. 

She told me the military had replanted Delville Wood, as a sacred monument, but, she confided, not with hornbeams.

Spring 2019

My roots mingle with the new trees that have grown up all around me. I am 200 years old now. I will not grow much taller, but at noon my shadow rests on the empty terrace and my branches can almost touch the sky.

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I loved how the passage of time is recounted by the ancient tree, and how the pain of war and loss is described. The gentle voice seems to embody the great structure of the tree, an observant witness of the personal interludes of history, with characters that are visible and believable to the reader. A haunting and delicate piece.

Catherine McNamara

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Time, place and change emerge as key themes through the anchoring image and point of view of the tree. A family epic in micro.

Adam Lowe

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Helen Williams is a former accountant, who is slowly replacing her appreciation of numbers with a love for words. She was born in Wales but has spent most of her life living outside of the Principality, which explains her inherited love of rugby and singing loudly.

 

We are thrilled to announce our short-list for the summer Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2021.

Congratulations to all of the authors who reached the list. 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.

SHORTLISTED STORIES

A Migration by Lydia Benson

All the times we could have eaten fish together by Ruth Bradshaw

Cliff walking by Barnaby Davis

Convalescence by Matthew Tucker

Dandelion & the trapeze event by Niamh MacCabe

Dog on balcony. No dog on balcony by Philip Carter

Every time I smell pineapple grilling by Brittany Terwilliger

Ice finger by Julie Evans

Masquerade Sarah Martin

Now you don’t Hazel Osmond

Profit and loss by Kevin Cheeseman

The wish by Kevin West

The wolf and the deer by Lucas Cammack

The Hornbeam’s lament by Helen Williams

The magical white canvas shoes by Gayathiri Dhevi Appathurai

Twenty-one species of fish called Sardine by Rosaleen Lynch

Two sugars by Audrey Niven

Was you going somewhere nice? by Anthony Cartwright

When the Monster is Hungry by Holly Kybett-Smith

Whiskey to milk by Tracey-anne Plater

Soon we will be announcing those behind the shortlist and longlist, and the winners!

Our next competition will be opening on the 1 November 2021. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting your gems.

We are thrilled to announce our long-list for the summer Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2021.

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. 

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.

LONGLISTED STORIES

A Migration by Lydia Benson

All the times we could have eaten fish together by Ruth Bradshaw

Beauty by Georgia Cook

Blue by John Barron

Cliff walking by Barnaby Davis

Corvid epidemic cure by Sharon Boyle

Dandelion & the trapeze event by Niamh MacCabe

Dog on balcony. No dog on balcony by Philip Carter

Every time I smell pineapple grilling by Brittany Terwilliger

Where the happiness goes by Paddy McKenna

Ice finger by Julie Evans

Masquerade Sarah Martin

Mothers’ ruin by Yvonne Clarke

Now you don’t Hazel Osmond

Convalescence by Matthew Tucker

Profit and loss by Kevin Cheeseman

Rules for boys at play by Erik Wijkström

The favourite place G.A Wolf

The wish by Kevin West

The wolf and the deer by Lucas Cammack

The Hornbeam’s lament by Helen Williams

The magical white canvas shoes by Gayathiri Dhevi Appathurai

The twelve days of Christmas by David McVey

The workday by Brian Gully

Twenty-one species of fish called Sardine by Rosaleen Lynch

Two sugars by Audrey Niven

Was you going somewhere nice? by Anthony Cartwright

What goes around by David Lewis

Touch me again before I die by David Lewis

When the Monster is Hungry by Holly Kybett-Smith

Whiskey to milk by Tracey-anne Plater

In the next few weeks, we will be announcing our shortlist and then our winners.

So watch this space! 

Our next competition will be opening on the 1 November 2021. So if you don’t find yourself on this list, we hope you’ll try again in our next competition and keep crafting your gems.