Two Nude Night Owls
by Adam Brannigan
Its past midnight, and I’m sitting at my fire pit, burning old letters from old girlfriends. Old photos. Old birthday cards. Trinkets and whatever. It’s time to let go. I’m getting older. Which means I’m dying.
The fat man next door is swimming nude again. He also stays up late. Night owls. I can see into his yard, he can see into mine. We’ve never discussed a fence or planted a screen of shrubs, trees, whatever. We don’t even talk. He goes for a nude swim almost every night in summer. He waves, I wave back and that’s it. I probably shouldn’t. I used to be worried that he might see it as an invitation and wander over in the nude to have a chat just because I wave. But he never has wandered over, probably never will. Not sure why, but that makes me sad.
It might be against the law to be nude in your own pool or whatever, but I haven’t bothered to check. I don’t call the police because he doesn’t seem to mind when the smoke of my fire pit blows across the waters of his pool while he’s swimming in the light from blue LED’s. I guess you could say we have an understanding.
But you know, if he waved me over and invited me to swim with him, I would join him. I’d take off my clothes and jump in. We’d talk. Learn each other’s names. Do laps and somersaults like we were kids, not fat, not bitter, not probably dying or whatever. Just two nude night-owls.
In that possible future I’d think I’d probably never had a friend like him, ever. I’d be right, you know.
About the Author
Adam writes across genres, favouring the surreal, the fragmented the dystopian. He has had his work published online and in international and Australian anthologies and journals and is the recipient of several awards for his short stories, flash fiction and poetry. Adam is of Bardi and Nyul Nyul descent, but has other bloodlines that whisper their agonies and ecstasies to him
2nd Prize, October 2025 Award: Emily Rinkema
Vagina First
by Emily Rinkema
Two weeks after my twentieth birthday my mother begs me not to move to Montana by myself because she says I will be eaten by a grizzly bear, vagina first, and I laugh as I pack and ask if this is supposed to be a metaphor, imagining some cowboy going down on me in the parking lot of a dive bar called Bucky’s or Lucky’s or The Watering Hole, and she says no, it’s not a goddamn metaphor, and grabs my Camp TakaWaka tank top from my hands and folds it as if she works at GAP, and tells me that it’s a dangerous world out there, says things happen that we can’t plan for, says, for example, grizzly bears can smell menstrual blood from 20 miles away, and she tells me even bear spray and bells, both of which she ordered for me and has already packed in the bottom of my bag, won’t scare them off once they smell me, tromping through the mountains like a bloody dumpling, and I say, “Enough, Mom! I get it,” and I tell her I don’t even like to hike, that I can take care of myself, that I’m not some little girl anymore, and she says, “I know,” and then more quietly, “But that won’t matter to the grizzly,” and she curls up on my bed, legs and arms tucked in like they tell you to do if your bear spray fails.
About the Author
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Fictive Dream, Okay Donkey, JAKE, and Frazzled Lit, and she won the 2024 Cambridge and Lascaux Prizes for flash fiction. You can read her work at https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
3rd Prize October 2025 Award: Debra A Daniel
My Husband Watches Henry the Donkey
by Debra A Daniel
When the news is overwhelming, my husband turns to Youtube. “Here comes Henry,” he says. Henry’s owner brings treats and the donkey prances to the fence, braying and showing his toothy glee.
My husband smiles. “There are too many bad asses in this world,” he says. “We need more like Henry”
These days we’re losing sleep. Losing friends. Blocking them on Facebook. Avoiding neighbors with unwelcoming posters in their yards. The list of businesses we’re boycotting grows daily. My husband’s blood pressure is problematic. Mine, too. Our hearts as well. It’s tough to be healthy when the world makes us sick. At night we listen to yoga music or British podcasts because their accents soothe like a lullaby. There’ve been days when we moped and brooded and even answered, yes, to doctor’s office questionnaires about depression and sadness.
Then my husband found Henry, with his ridiculous grin, his jubilation over something as simple as an apple or a carrot or a Twizzler. On particularly disheartening news days, he binges on Henry. It doesn’t matter if he’s seen the video before, he still finds relief in the joyful little guy.
“Look at him,” my husband says. “He’s glad to be alive.”
“He’s not worried about the end of the world as we know it,” I say.
“Don’t say that in front of Henry,” my husband says. He chuckles “We don’t want to upset him.”
We sit at the kitchen table making signs for the weekend protest. Bright markers. Huge letters, Catchy puns. Pointed barbs. In the background, the iPad plays Youtube. Over and over, we pause from our dire musings to take comfort from Henry’s simple life in a pasture green and pleasant.
About the Author
Debra A. Daniel, is the author of three novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls The Roster (Ad Hoc Fiction), and In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit (Ad Hoc Fiction) which won the Bath Novella in Flash Award in 2025. She is also the author of the novel Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher (Muddy Ford Press) and poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August (Finishing Line Press) and As Is (Main Street Rag). She won the Fractured Lit Work/Play Challenge and was third place in Flash Fiction Magazine. She’s been nominated for Pushcart and Best Short Fictions, has been long listed and shortlisted in many competitions, and has won The Los Angeles Review short fiction prize. She was twice named SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellow, won the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, as well as numerous awards from the Poetry Society of SC. Work has appeared in journals and anthologies including: With One Eye on the Cows, Things Left and Found by the Side of the Road, The Los Angeles Review, Fall Lines, Smokelong Quarterly, Kakalak, Emrys Journal, Pequin, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, Gargoyle.She is retired from a career in teaching, now sings in a band with her husband, and was once on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.’
Highly Commended October 2025 Award: Dawn Tasaka Steffler
The Menopausal Woman and the Tsunami
by Dawn Tasaka Steffler
The Menopausal Woman is finally visiting her sister in Hawaii when an 8.7 earthquake rattles Russia, and now a goddamned tsunami is heading her way. Meanwhile, in California, her husband is freaking out, which, as newlyweds, would’ve been cute. But at her age, all she wants to do is lie on a swan floatie in her sister’s pool, and balance a third gin martini on her squishy tummy. Also, her sister isn’t worried; she has lived through plenty of tsunami warnings before, all of which led to nothing. But her husband, on the other hand! Texting readings from remote ocean buoys and maps of tsunami inundation zones, to which her sister’s house isn’t even close. Texting: Make sure you girls fill up gas, GPS shows highways = parking lot. Texting: Hello? Why is your phone still at the house?
And now her sister, who had gone inside to pee, is poolside again, waving a cell phone and rolling her eyes, “It’s Eric— ” The Menopausal Woman steers her swan to the edge of the pool. “Shouldn’t you be headed to higher ground?!” her husband says, panicking. Just then, emergency sirens go off in the mountains; the wave is now four hours out; her sister reenters the pool; over the phone, her husband is sobbing.
The Menopausal Woman takes in her surroundings: the bay is calm, the sky empty of clouds, and her sister is floating next to her. If today’s the day, this isn’t a bad way to go. But she can’t tell him that. Instead, she reassures him they’re being careful and gently extricates herself. Meanwhile, her sister, who is also menopausal, drains her glass and says, “Shall we have another?” But she doesn’t wait for an answer; her wet footprints trail into the house.
About the Author
Dawn Tasaka Steffler is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the 2023 Bath Flash Fiction Award, finalist for the 2025 Lascaux Review Prize in Flash Fiction, and selected for Best Small Fictions 2025, and an Anthology of Rural Stories by Writers of Color, 2025 (EastOver Press). Her stories appear in The Forge, JMWW, Sundog Lit, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and more. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on BlueSky, Instagram, and Facebook @dawnsteffler.
Alison Powell, First Prize, June 2025
The City of Los Angeles is on Tactical Alert
by Alison Powell
This is our daughter’s first step. This is a preliminary step. This is her on her feet. This is proactive. This is freedom. This is working to tackle the issues. This is transitional. This is a special force. This is our daughter standing unaided. This is a team trained to handle situations beyond the capabilities of ordinary law enforcement. This is pivotal. This is a high level of violence. This is crucial. This is the controlled redistribution of on-duty personnel. This is finding balance. This is an obstacle in the way. This is a glance for confirmation that yes, she has found her vertical. This is a response to a major incident. This is me grabbing your wrist and urging you to: Look! This is city wide. This is you locked into your screen. This is a result of low-staffing. This is our daughter smiling. This is due to disruption. This is you not responding. This is in response to a protest. This is in response to her unaided standing. This is a response to anticipated looting. This raised voice is my response to your lack of response. This is a heightened level of response. This is your glance in the wrong direction. This is a response where officers can be kept on past their shift end time. This is inattention to what is important. This is a force being moved around between divisions. This is your daughter falling. This is a precursor to a mobilization. This is you missing the moment. This is intervening in high-risk situations. This is our daughter crying. This is a stun grenade. This is violence. This is tear gas. This is too much. This is suspicion of assault. This is a protest. This is a protest. This is all of us on tactical alert.
About the Author
Alison Powell is a writer and teacher who believes the world is a better place when we allow ourselves to create. Her fiction has been long- and short-listed in numerous contests (Mslexia, Writer’s HQ, Reflex and TSS amongst others) won the local author prize in the Bath Short Story Award and runner-up places in Flash 500 and the Bridport Prize. She co-edited the 2018 National Flash Fiction Day anthology and has been published in a growing pile of anthologies, magazines and online publications. She runs writing workshops through her venture WriteClub and supports a global community of writers. Find her on Insta/FB: @hellowriteclub or via www.alisonpowell.co.uk
Joseph Randolph Second Prize, June 2025
Psalm (After the Animals)
by Joseph Randolph
The dog’s been gone ten winters, bone-vanished, creek-gnawed, myth by now—and still she calls it, not namewise, but gutward, where grief nests in a pit of salt. Not loud. Just in the throat, just enough to reopen the place where language scabs.
She descends the hillpath in hush rhythm, soles clagged with rainrot. Cedar tongues peel back from bark like old liturgy. The girl—not girl, not since the orchard wound her dress to thorn, not since the thigh-bloom and afterward hush—walks with the gait of someone who remembers too well how her body once believed it was chosen.
In her hand: rotwood, soft as marrow. In her mouth: the silence after a name is unsaid.
The boy—who laughed into her thigh, who said stay like a psalm cracked sideways—did not stay. He unbecame. Became ash-tray name, pubside rumor, verse in a cousin’s wedding toast.
Now she counts mushrooms like relics. Haloed under bark, pale as skin under first frost. Each one a failed gospel. Each one waiting.
A hawk calls overhead, the cry sounding like punctuation to a sentence she never finishes. She does not look up. The sky has become impassable.
She kneels by the old stump, dog-shaped in memory, ringed with moss that glows like bruised saints. Her palms find the wet wood. Her lips open.
Not prayer. Not name. Older than that. What came before names. What Orpheus forgot to sing.
She presses her forehead to the stump and waits.
Waits.
Waits for the wound to reopen. For the hill to remember. For the dog to come limping back through rainlight, tongue wild, eyes full of god.
About the Author
Joseph Randolph is a writer and artist from the Midwest working in prose, poetry, painting, and experimental music. His books include Vacua Vita, Sum: A Lyric Parody, and The End of Thinking. His debut novel, Genius & Irrelevance< is out for publication. Music is streaming; paintings are on Instagram @jtrndph.
Sharon Telfer, Third Prize, June 2025
Revelation, 1859
by Sharon Telfer
All night the roof rattling like Old Nick himself’s dancing hobnailed cross the tiles, thunder crashing loud as doomsday, but us clammed safe in our beds, thanking the good Lord for sending such a storm at Eastertide, the cobles hauled up on the strand, trussed tight as chickens, each man counted, ganseys steaming by the last of the Saturday stove, my boys in their steady bunks, my Frank’s arms lashed fast around me not wrestling lines in some gale blasting the deep.
And morning comes, still as milk. We busy ourselves to the harbour, turned out neat and ready for hymns and hallelujahs and ‘He is risen’, the waves right where they should be, no surge up the slipway, the floor bone-dry in the Anchor, the well drawing sweet, all smiling and blesseds and handshakes, when Braithwaite’s lad, him that’s too simple to handle the nets but who can no more lie than he can tie a knot, staggers panting up the beach, sand-speckled as a pollock, yelling to shift ourselves for the Beast were risen out of the sea and the days of Revelation were upon us.
So over the breakwater we clamber, never minding our Sunday best, fret spitting in our eyes, until we are stopped, gawping: the great slab fallen, the tall rowan toppled to anemone, roots grasping at air, the shale still skittering, the monstrous marvel of it, that dreadful tail and dragonish claw, grin long as a flagpole, teeth big as bairns, crawling from what ancient darkness?, and Frank’s hand cannot warm the doubt chilling my spine, even the wheeling kittiwakes dumbfounded to silence, and nothing to hear but the shush of a tide going out and the chapel bell stuttering at the top of the torn and barefaced cliff.
About the Author
Sharon Telfer’s flash fiction has won prizes including the Bath Flash Fiction Award (twice) and the Reflex Fiction Prize. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. Her flash fiction collection, The Map Waits, is published by Reflex Press and was longlisted for the 2022 Edgehill Short Story Prize. She lives in the Yorkshire Wolds, in the north of England.
Michelle Wright, Highly Commended June 2025
Negative
by Michelle Wright
Seven months after Mum’s death, Dad bought a 1968 Leica and turned their ensuite into a darkroom.
“A positive sign,” said my brother.
Until then, during our weekly visits Dad would slump in his recliner, speaking in monosyllables; mostly sitting in silence. Now he locked himself away, developing black and white images of the strangers he photographed on suburban streets. He hung the strips of negatives from clothes lines strung across his bedroom. They formed long bars of faces, like a curtain we could see through but couldn’t cross; like the plastic strips hung in doorways to keep out flies.
Before we left each Sunday evening, we’d stand in the hallway to say goodbye. He wouldn’t answer, but we’d see his face behind the negatives, his eyes straining through the black and silver shapes. We weren’t sure if he even printed the photographs. We never saw them anyway.
His death,unlike Mum’s, was sudden. A heart attack. We waited a month before touching the undeveloped roll of film sitting by the bathroom sink. We studied the instructions, assembled all the equipment and, in total darkness, transferred the film to the developing tank. With the lights back on we poured the liquids in, one after the other, waiting until the process was complete.
When the film was ready, we wiped the excess moisture from the long, thin strip and pegged it up to dry. We didn’t recognise the faces straight away. It’s harder than you think on a negative. It was my brother who said, “That’s us.” Thirty-six exposures, taken from a distance; from across the hall, through the half-open ensuite door. Some of us together. Some just my brother or me. Sitting. Standing. Staring into space. Missing Mum. Silently waiting for Dad to emerge from the dark
About the Author
Michelle Wright lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her short stories and flash fiction have won and been shortlisted in numerous awards, including The Age Short Story Award, V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize and Bridport Prize. They have been published in Australia and internationally. Her short story collection, Fine, was published in 2016. Her first novel, Small Acts of Defiance, was published in Australia in 2021 and US in 2022. Her second novel, Good Boy, will be out in April 2026.
Christine H. Chen Highly Commended, June 2025
Awakening
by Christine H Chen
Ah Ma came back from the overnight stay at the hospital in April, leaning on Ba’s shoulder, eyes vacant. Ba shushed us away. Ma went to lay down, didn’t come out from the bedroom for a week. When she emerged in her pajamas, hair tangled like a ball of strings, she went to the fridge, pulled out a box of frozen shrimp Siu Mai, and stared out at the kitchen window until water dripped from the box. We microwaved soggy pieces of dim sum. Ma took a look at the winkled dumplings on her plate, dropped her chopsticks, ran back to her room. For weeks, Ba picked us up from school with bags of Burger King and French fries, sometimes tubs of Moo Shu pork and egg noodle. We chewed as quietly as possible, not daring to break the silence. We stuck our ears to their bedroom door. Ba talking to Ma in a soft voice that rose higher and higher. “What about them? Your other kids, our daughters?” Early morning, a month later, we heard Ma’s old Honda pulling out of the driveway. We spent summer looking for Ma in the supermarkets, running through the aisles, craning our necks to stare at women with a shopping cart, while Ba was busy arguing with the butcher, agonizing over which brand of rice to get. The day our maple tree turned crimson, we heard keys jangling in our front door. Ma stood at the threshold, thinner and older. We squealed. She embraced us. Later that night, she lit up a fire in the backyard, gave us each a piece of a baby garment to throw in the fire. The smoke stung our eyes, the smell caught in our throat. We burned paper money. The fire leapt. Flames jumped. A soul sparked.
About the Author
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared or forthcoming in Cleaver, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, Best Small Fictions 2024, 2025 anthologies. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the hybrid novel My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). Her stories can be found at www.christinehchen.com
Tiffany Harris: February 2025, Highly Commended
How to Fold a World Map
by Tiffany Harris
The third time the ICU called, I was folding Mongolia. The crease ran straight through Ulaanbaatar, crisp and irreversible. You have to be careful with these things, the way paper remembers every fold, every pressure, every hand that ever tried to smooth it back to what it was before.
At your bedside, the maps pile up, pressed flat under an old biology textbook, the weight never quite enough to undo what I’ve done. I’ve folded the continents in ways they were never meant to bend. You don’t notice. Your fingers, small and bird-boned, worry the corner of your blanket instead.
‘You’ll tear it,” I say but your gaze is distant, caught somewhere between the IV pole and the darkened window. I know that stare. It’s the same one I wear when the nurses ask if I want anything — water, food, sleep. Things I used to need before all of this.
You ask me what I’m making today. I tell you it’s a crane, but that’s a lie. The truth is, I don;t know. I keep folding, keep pressing my thumb along fault lines that don’t exist.
You’ve started doing this thing where you close your eyes mid-conversation, as if testing how the world feels without looking at it. I try not to count how long they stay shut. I try not to notice when you take longer to reopen them.
That night, I sit in the hard plastic chair and watch your chest rise and fall in time with the heart monitor. You sleep like you are trying to hold onto something, but in the morning, you reach for me instead.In your hands, a crumpled thing, creases running wild across its surface.
“It’s a heart,” you say. “For you.”
You smooth the Pacific first, careful not to tear Japan.
About the Author
Tiffany Harris
Tiffany Harris is a flash fiction author and sales enabler living in NorCal who hasn’t been the same since Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout discovered the world doesn’t wait for garbage to take itself out. She is the winner of the Tadpole Press 100-Word Writing Contest and has been longlisted for SmokeLong Quarterly’s Grand Micro Prize (The Mikey) and the Not Quite Write Prize with words appearing or forthcoming in Black Glass Pages, Humana Obscura, WestWord, Buckman Journal, and elsewhere. When not writing, she’s busy convincing herself that sarcasm counts as cardio.
– https://x.com/proliffany
– https://bsky.app/profile/proliffany.bsky.social