Being It

31 …. 32 ….  33…

I raise my head and look through the twisted tangle of naked branches to the cloudless sky. 

Their giggling retreat behind me confirms my suspicions.  Last time, red-faced, heart-wounded and strewn with cobweb lace and rhododendron petals, I had sneaked past Tilly’s garden where they sat laughing and eating biscuits.

48 …. 49 …. 50! 

The dead tree is my only witness. 

I hope for acceptance, but today I will not go looking for it.

Resting my head against the weathered trunk, I listen for the chomp of the woodlice and pretend it doesn’t hurt.


This story was shortlisted in the June 2023 monthly micro fiction competition.

About the author: Jan Erskine-Power is an avid reader, gardener, crafter and lover of tiny tales.

How To Carry Countries Inside You

The afternoon that a bolt of lightning struck a tree on St. Edmonds, Josephina signed over her Italian citizenship. While officially American on paper, when she stepped out of the cab blocks from her Brooklyn apartment and smelled burning wood, she was of Portici, her father’s fig tree overhanging her family’s kitchen steps. She remembered how the figs would rot, fall, burst on gravel. Amethyst split in two, byzantium hemming in laurel like fresh wood. At dusk, she watched wasps curl inside the chalky flowers and give their wings in payment. Let the tree swallow them whole to live again. 


This story won second prize in the June 2023 monthly micro fiction competition.

About the author: Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over 100 publications in the last decade. Her most recent work can be found with Flash Frog and Ghost Parachute. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Follow her on twitter @salaylay_c

In The Shade Of My Mother

“I’m fine,” she says in the learned English way though her dry skin is scaly, her voice as rasping as bark. When I hug her close, I feel she might break. Her bones are twig-brittle, bare of the plumpness of blossom.

“And you?” she asks.

“All good,” I reply, and we let both our lies slide though once she was sturdy, strong rooted and sure. 

Now I’m the ripe one, bearing fruit and though she still feeds me seeds of her wisdom, feeds me with love, I’m already grieving, knowing she’ll be leaving me soon. Leaving me hungry for more.


This story won first prize and the People’s Prize in the June 2023 monthly micro fiction competition.

About the author: Emily Macdonald was born in England but grew up in New Zealand. She has won and been placed in several writing competitions and has work published in print anthologies and on-line journals including Fictive Dream, Reflex Fiction, Lucent Dreaming, Retreat West, Ellipsis Zine, Roi Fainéant, Flash Frontier, Free Flash Fiction and The Phare.

Thoughts While In Flight

One, we gazed together across the frozen lake. Two, he enfolded me in what felt like a spontaneous hug. Three, he hoisted me, swung me around and launched me over the ice.

Key insight: so this was the reason he’d been weight training, carb loading and downing protein powder shakes.

While airborne, I readied myself for a splintery crash and/or hypothermic depths. But maintaining the trajectory, I flexed my limbs to avoid cramp. And reconsidered my opinion of divorce, previously a no-no. 

The only thing I regretted losing was a pink scarf my mum gave me, soft as a cloud.


This story won joint second prize in the May 2023 monthly micro fiction competition.

About the author: Frances Gapper’s stories have been published in three Best Microfiction anthologies and in lit mags including Splonk, Wigleaf, Twin Pies, Under the Radar, 100 word story, MacQueen’s Quinterly and New Flash Fiction Review.

Masking

The projector shows two peppered moths; speckled white, coal black. Mrs Sullivan says pollution, adaption, camouflage. You stim the soft word moth in your mind.

Kiki McClain clacks her red talons against the desk, her supple body slack. Clack, clack, clack. You slack back against the hard, wooden chair. You blank your face to boredom. At the back, the pack of boys howl at a joke about Mrs Sullivan having moths up her crack. Kiki hisses a snigger. You snigger too. Moth, moth, moth, you say inside your head. Blank, back slack, snigger. 

Tonight, you’ll paint your naked nails red. 


This story won joint second prize in the May 2023 monthly micro fiction competition.

About the author: Fiona Dignan started writing during lockdown to cope with the chaos of home-schooling four children. This year, she won The London Society Poetry Prize and The Plaza Prize for Sudden Fiction. In 2022, she was longlisted for the Reflex Flash Fiction Autumn Prize and EHP Barnard Poetry Prize.

A Story As Old As The World

They came with fizz fizz bottles of American drinks, gas bubbles rising so fast your elders mistook those carbonated spheres for signs of life and tipped their contents into a bucket, shocked when the sticky brown river flowed without fish.

They came with crisp crisp notes and phones that sang; they bemoaned the lack of signal and worshipped the Gods of WiFi, chasing the sun to the edge of the horizon by nightfall. Then they left.

 He came with a snap snap camera to trap the earth, sky and your smile, his bare bare skin daring you to stare back.


This story was shortlisted in the May 2023 monthly micro fiction competition.

About the author: Emma Phillips is a teacher from Devon. Her work has been placed in the Bath Flash Award, NFFD Micro Competition 2022 and she won 2nd place in the final Retreat West Flash Fiction Competition. She is currently trying to find a home for her Bath Flash shortlisted novella-in-flash.