Thank you to Gail Aldwin for providing this month’s prompt. Gail is a Dorset-based writer of fiction and poetry. Her short fiction collection Paisley Shirt was longlisted in the best short story category of the Saboteur Awards 2018 and her novel The String Games, about a child lost on a holiday in France, is available through her website, gailaldwin.com.
We received 117 entries and so the winner will receive £234, in addition to a free entry to the annual Retreat West Flash Fiction Prize. The runner-up will get a free entry too, plus both stories will be published in the Flash Fiction section of our website.
The final ten will be published next Monday with public voting opening at the same time.
All readings and votes are anonymous so writers if you are on this longlist, please do not tell anyone which story is yours.
Thank you to all who submitted and congrats if you made the longlist!
Longlist:
- After the Great Mutation
- An Afternoon’s Drive in Aftermath Town
- Berlin 1936
- Beyond the Amusement Park
- Candy Floss
- Carousel
- Daffodil Yellow
- Fairground Attraction
- Feral
- First & Last Date
- Floating Away
- From the Top of the Ferris Wheel, I Can See Chernobyl
- I’ve Got You In My Sights Hayley Pringle
- Learning to Drive
- Luck
- Neglected
- non-Reactor 4
- Reclamation
- Scrap Heaps and Forgotten Places
- Selective Memory
- ‘Ten Years After the Pandemic’ Symposium – The findings of the first trip into the outside world
- The fun in funfair
- The girl who ran away with the fair
- The Lies Of Summer
- The Moon That Saw Him Buried
- The Skirt
- The Year I Got My Braces Off
- Under the Willows
- Waiting for Lucy
- When the Rot Sets In
- Why we don’t talk about the theme park
- Wrapped in rust
- Wreck
- Yellow Skeletons
- Zap! Zoom!
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