Domestic Appliance

S. A. Greene

Marianne awoke to find she’d turned into a washing machine. Fortunately, she was upright, and able to manoeuvre herself into the kitchen. But without hands she could hardly be expected to make breakfast.

– Could you make the toast, today, Kenneth? I’ve turned into a washing machine.

– Course, love. Do you want marmalade?

– Oh, go on then. And a nice cup of tea.

Kenneth carefully folded the toast into the detergent tray and poured the tea into the fabric softener compartment. After making his own packed lunch, he set off for work, pleased with himself for helping out.


This story won the People’s Prize vote in the May 2021 Monthly Micro Competition.

About the author: S.A. Greene lives and writes in Derbyshire. She is working on completing her first novel but enjoys a bit of micro and flash on the side.

Shortlist: CIRCUS themed flash

Many thanks to all the writers who sent us stories for this great theme. We’re delighted to reveal our shortlist! Congrats to all whose stories appear here and commiserations if your story didn’t advance from the longlist this time around – it’s always a tough decision to make!

Our judge, Sherry Morris, will now make the final decision. As always no telling which story title is yours if it appears below!

Shortlisted Stories

  • An invitation arrives addressed to the woman in the ‘See Her Change From Beauty to Beast’ booth
  • Cirque de la Vie
  • Helen Joined the Circus
  • Inside the Magical World of Claudia Dawson
  • Like a Kid in a Candy Store
  • Python Parlari
  • Russian Dolls
  • The Carousel
  • Tightwire
  • We all fall down, and get up again?

Best of luck everyone! Winners coming in early June.

There next themed flash comp closes 27th June and the theme is: THE UNCANNY. Get all the info and enter here.

Shortlist: May 21 Monthly Micro

Well done to all who made the longlist and congrats to the 10 writers of the stories below who have now gone through to the shortlist. No telling anyone which is yours though!

As the voting is now open for the People’s Prize vote and it needs to remain anonymous.

Vote for your favourite at the bottom of the page by 23.59 UK time on Monday 24th May. Winners of the cash prizes (decided by our judging panel) and the People’s Prize vote will be announced on Tuesday 25th May.

Good luck everyone!


A Change of Heart

The man is disappearing, eyes without a face. The woman bends over a cactus. Thorns stud her words with succulent punctuation. Her resolve is half-hearted, her panty lines are visible. She lives with the man in perpetual orgasm. Toes never uncurl. The man offers her things from the bottom of his heart: a mixtape, scuffed up Skee-Ball, Red Bulls, a losing lotto ticket. A singular pigeon bobs out of his chest. A child appears with a clipboard and a megaphone. She does the intake forms; takes the chamber’s measurements. Blood stains the woman’s dress.


Bin Day

The wilting lilies leave a yellow-powdered kiss on my bathrobe as I push them into the green bin. Next I dismantle their cardboard honour guard of pastel blooms, foggy lakes and backlit trees. Long-memorised words are buried deferentially on a cushion of tissue boxes.

Whisky fumes make me gag as I flush the rusty liquid down the sink. The bottle prevents the blue bin closing.

Later, showered and freshly clothed, I place my steaming coffee cup on the sunlit garden table. Inhaling the sweet fragrance of lilac, I watch a resplendent Red Admiral alight on the blossom.

She loved butterflies.


Domestic Appliance

Marianne awoke to find she’d turned into a washing machine. Fortunately, she was upright, and able to manoeuvre herself into the kitchen. But without hands she could hardly be expected to make breakfast.

– Could you make the toast, today, Kenneth? I’ve turned into a washing machine.

– Course, love. Do you want marmalade?

– Oh, go on then. And a nice cup of tea.

Kenneth carefully folded the toast into the detergent tray and poured the tea into the fabric softener compartment. After making his own packed lunch, he set off for work, pleased with himself for helping out.


Holometabolous

Fact: The larvae of holometabolous insects bear no resemblance to the adults.

When I held your hand, people stared.

Is she—?

All her father, you said.

Like it’s a curse.

Fact: When a larva becomes a pupa, it will stop eating and moving.

If you couldn’t love me, I’d become as light as the feather on your felt hat.

Fact: When the adult leaves the pupa, it relaxes under the sun while its exoskeleton hardens.

When I finally ran, you yelled that I wouldn’t last a week. Yet here I am now, sorting through your belongings.


Me and You

Your paw on my shoulder, you sitting upright on the bed like a Victorian paterfamilias except for the tip of your tail wafting and your alert ears.

The bed has bars instead of a headboard. You sleep underneath it.

After they put us here we exchanged vows, to be each other’s. Was that wise, I don’t know. My past lovers were all quite samey and you’re so different. I long for slippers and hearth, you dream of insects.

Squeaky-wheel me across the floorboards, unpeel the shadows from my feet and rub me into happy velvet patterns, on our imaginary ottoman.


Paper Bird

My husband fiddles paper birds from discarded poetry, setting them on the dresser.

I am prosaic, dusting the tiny figures, mouthing the broke-beaked singing words half valleyed in the folds.

He is the prophet-poet, scaffolding miniature worlds, whispering secrets.

Here, on the brisk, cutting edge of his scant attention, I feel I am unfolding. Like a piece of his origami, being unmade.

I protest loudly, not wanting to be read. Not wanting my intimate inner creases exposed.

Furious, my husband tinders a lucifer, burning me down to smoking ashes.

But I’m a foolscap fledgling phoenix. On sulphurous flames I rise.


Sad Song of the Backwards Selkie

I thought you had to be born a selkie, or whatever it’s called this way round.

I had no idea all it might take was one drunken, midnight skinny-dip (under the witchy aurora light), someone nicks your clothes, and next thing you know, you’re a lolling, legless heap of blubber on a rock. Whiskery muzzle bloody with fish guts.

The tourist boats pass by and I call out, strain to clap my stubby flippers together. But they only laugh and snap photos.

No idea that I’m screaming, Can’t any of you help me?

Warning them, I was once like you.


The Swan Song

Five orphan cygnets, the last of their down just cast, manoeuvre round the ice, hoovering the riverbed for pondweed.

They’re coming of age.

As am I.

Mother would strap my hands behind my back. ‘Don’t pick the scabs. They’ll bleed.’

Every night my sisters loosened the knot, kissed my oozing wounds, sang to me. In our cottage, hidden by an awning of staked down elder branches, they succumbed one by one.

Smoke from their funeral pyres shields the sun as I heave father’s dinghy into the swans’ wake and drift downstream, my sisters’ harmonies echoing on through the crackling flames.


The Year of Solitude

The beer had turned lukewarm on the walk over and his jacket sat in a film of rain across his shoulders. He shuffled crablike to avoid the shoulders of people he didn’t know.

Company colored the room “newly lit cigarette”, a cacophony of mouths wide and laughing in a way that made him wonder about the air quality.

His armpits dampened and instead of the toilet, he found a closet and sank into the hardwood dark. Silence touched his arm.

What he’d give to turn into a house plant here. Exhaling, inhaling, normal, natural. Tendrils calmly withered in the pitch.


Username: Butterfly

“Don’t bug me,” I tell my daughter.

Swatting that aside, she signs me up and chooses my username: Butterfly.

Men in the late stages of life—antennae bent or missing, holes in wings and the elbows of their cardigans—flutter across the laptop.

“Try it, Mum.” Salve on the pain of breaking up after thirty years.

I type “Hello.” Buzz, buzz, buzz. I’m swarmed like a porch light at night, as if I’m the last flower, the last nectar they’ll ever find.

Too much. I log out and caterpillar to the couch to cocoon and ponder who I’ll become now.


Vote using the form below or if you have any issues with the form, you can vote on this link: https://form.responster.com/8LZB3N

Longlist May 21 Monthly Micro

Many thanks to all your changelings out there who sent a story for the METAMORPHOSIS theme this month. We received 143 entries this month so the cash prizes are £214 and £143 for first and second place. People’s Prize to be revealed with the results!

Well done to all who wrote and submitted a story and congrats to the writers whose story titles are listed below. No revealing your title to anyone though!


Longlisted Stories

  • A Change of Heart
  • A Star is Born
  • All Change
  • Becoming a Man
  • Bin Day
  • Charis’ Chetak
  • Domestic Appliance
  • Egg, Larva, Pupa, Adult
  • From Tin to Plastic
  • Growing Pains
  • Her Father Never Liked Him
  • Holometabolous
  • In Which Cinderella Takes Drastic Action
  • Inheritance
  • Me and You
  • My Brother’s Turning into Franz Kafka
  • My Real Mum Assume a New Form
  • On Finding a Selkie
  • Paper Bird
  • Reverse Metamorphosis
  • Sad Song of the Backwards Selkie
  • The Artist
  • The Changeling
  • The Practical Uses of Classical Myth
  • The Swan Song
  • The Three States of Water
  • The Year of Solitude
  • This Consecrated Place
  • Transmogrification
  • Username: Butterfly
  • What Happens in the Rialto Stays in the Cleaner’s Closet of the Rialto

Shortlist will be online on Monday 17th May. Good luck everyone!

Longlist: CIRCUS themed flash

Many thanks to everyone who sent us a story for this theme. We received 93 entries.

We enjoyed reading them all and send our hearty congratulations to the writers of our 25 longlisted stories. We’re still reading anonymously so no letting anyone know what your story is called if it’s on this list!

Longlisted Stories

  • A circus inside her
  • All eyes on me
  • An invitation arrives addressed to the woman in the ‘See Her Change From Beauty to Beast’ booth
  • Another kind of circus
  • Cirque de la Vie
  • Custard Pie
  • Dandelion Clock Head
  • Entertained at the Sollershot Circus
  • Helen Joined the Circus
  • Inside the Magical World of Claudia Dawson
  • Learning Love from a Lemur
  • Like a kid in a candy store
  • O! my America
  • On a Knife Edge
  • Python Parlari
  • Russian Dolls
  • The Carousel
  • The Circus
  • The Elephant Man
  • The Spirit of Jumbo and the Eternal Mother
  • Tightwire
  • Trapping the Snow Leopard
  • Two for Joy
  • We all fall down, and get up again?
  • Wink

Winners: April 2021 Monthly Micro Fiction

We’ve had some debates this month and it was difficult to choose among the 10 fantastic shortlisted stories. But choose we have and we also received just under 200 votes for the People’s Prize.

Many congratulations to all 10 shortlisted writers and well done to our winners!

The cash prizes are £226 for first place and £151 for second. The People’s Prize is a day ticket to our Online Flash Fest. The winner can pick which day they’d like to attend!

Shortlist

  • Alternative Therapy by Katie Oliver
  • Degrees of Corrosive Fanaticism by Helene La Cour
  • Inheritance by Maria Thomas
  • Martha Takes Her First Drive in Frank’s Car by Alison Wassell
  • Pieces of Our Boy by Kay Rae Chomic
  • Searching for a Blazer on the School’s Donated Clothing Rail by Joanne Clague
  • She Will Recover Her Wings by Keely O’Shaughnessy
  • The Only Way I Can Make Sense of the Word ‘Recovery’ is to Smash it into Pieces by James Montgomery
  • The Sea Change by Hilary Ayshford
  • What They Recovered, and What They Didn’t by Morgan Quinn

First Prize: Pieces of Our Boy by Kay Rae Chomic

We loved this poignant story of sisters remembering their lost brother by lying under the quilt they made from his clothes. Lovely tone and great little details deftly reveal character for the living and the dead.


Second Prize: Searching for a Blazer on the School’s Donated Clothing Rail by Joanne Clague

Another poignant story of loss with some lovely imagery. The question marks of the clothes hangers immediately set up the questions about why it was so important to find this piece of clothing.


People’s Prize Winner: Martha Takes Her First Drive in Frank’s Car by Alison Wassell

We’re not surprised this won the vote as it is a universal tale of loss that is also filled with hope.


Many congratulations to our winners, especially Alison Wassell who has won the People’s Prize vote 2 months in a row!

A special mention to The Only Way I Can Make Sense of the Word ‘Recovery’ is to Smash it into Pieces by James Montgomery as it was a close second place winner in the People’s Prize vote and in the cash prize votes as well. Fantastic structure and the story told within it is powerful too.

The May competition launches on Monday 3rd so see you again soon!