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
Jay McKenzie, February 2025, Highly Commended
Forgive Me Martha
by Jay McKenzie
Forgive me Martha, for I have not trimmed. It has been six months since my last haircut and I have used the GHDs with abandon. I home dyed and forgot to Vaseline my hairline. I went on holiday and let sunscreen grease and the bitter tang of chlorine strip my hair of moisture. I squeezed raw lemon juice on my head and baked under a relentless sun, I singed the ends with a drunken cigarette. I let a postman from Ross-on-Wye tangle his fat sausage-fingers in it, didn’t cry too hard when he pulled some out. Oh Martha, forgive me for the way I took to the split ends, pinching the forked tails with bitten fingernails and split them apart like conjoined twin surgery. Back when I stopped getting out of bed, I didn’t brush or wash it for a month. When I eventually bathed, thick spider legs of hair lay inert across the greying surface of the water and I wondered how red my blood would look mixing with the soap scum. Since my boyfriend left, I have yanked no fewer than seven fat greasy locks from random spots on my head to send him in the post and all I got in return was a community police officer warning. O my God, I am heartily sorry for having wrecked my halo, and I detest all my transgressions because I dread the loss of the thing I hide behind to give the appearance of beauty and the pains of potentially having to show the world my bare and unhidable face. I have offended you, my stylist, my listener, whose work is art, whose ears are always open. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy healing hands, to do penance, and to amend my ways. Amend.
About the Author
Jay McKenzie’s work appears in Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal, Fictive Dream and others. She has been recognised in prizes such as Exeter Story Prize, The Henshaw Prize, Quiet Man Dave, Edinburgh Story Award, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Exeter Novel Prize, The Alpine Fellowship, Bath Short Story Award, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, The Bridport Prize, Fish Short Story Prize, The Wenlock Olympian Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her novel, Mim and Wiggy’s Grand Adventure (Serenade, 2023), will be followed by How to Lose the Lottery (Harper Fiction, 2026).
Sara Hills: February 2025, First Prize
Like Dynamite
by Sara Hills
The time Ben and Mark jumped their BMX bikes off Pullman Street bridge; the time they jammed bricks in their pockets and tried to baptize themselves in Snake River; the time they shot BBs at each other’s bare calves and blotted the blood with their t-shirts; the time they huffed turpentine; the time they huffed rubber cement; the time they huffed Mark’s ma’s bleach and Ben’s ma’s oven cleaner and the hollow belly of an old gas can warmed in the sun; the time they compared their dads’ Sunday night beatings to their mas’ squalls of disappointment; the time they vowed they’d try harder to fit in; the time they swore they’d fuck Jenny Jamison if they got the chance; the time they each got the chance and chickened out; the time they joked they’d rather suck Jesus off the cross than even kiss a skank like Jenny Jamison; the time they snuck out of church after call to worship; the time they snuck out of church during Lord’s Prayer; the time they sprinted clean past the parking lot and on down Rutger Road in their Miami Vice jackets and Sunday ties and darted into the woods, pines gianting around them while Ben pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and his church tie from his neck and begged Mark to hold him down, eyes wide, Ben’s open mouth like a fish, pulsing against the plastic, thrashing, kicking up the sweet rot of earth and again, a perfect hum engining under their collective ribs, both of them hard as pylons, as bridge railings, lit like dynamite, their mouths fogging the taut plastic between them.
About the Author
Sara Hills is the author of TThe Evolution of Birds (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021), winner of the 2022 Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection. She has won or placed in the Smokelong Mikey, 2023, QuietManDave Prize for flash nonfiction, the Retreat West quarterly prize, National Flash Fiction Day’s micro competition, Bath Flash Fiction Award, and The Welkin Prize. Sara’s work has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, The Best Small Fictions, and the BIFFY 50, as well as nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net.
Dawn Miller: February 2025 Second Prize
Pack
by Dawn Miller
We prowl through corridors as she scuttles away, shoulder knocking metal lockers. Baggy sweater, lank hair, a zit on her chin—there’s too much to make fun of—and so we snap gum in her ear, snap her bra strap in science, snap photos of her eating homemade pickle-and-cheese sandwiches in the library, then post them online with tags like loser, creep, waste of space.
We are fifteen and glorious, light-filled and honey-limbed. Boys seep through our gel-tipped fingers like the inches of gin, whiskey, and vodka we steal from our parents’ liquor cabinets and funnel into thermoses, then anoint with packets of purple Kool-Aid and call the mixture Jesus Juice.
We lord over hallways as the girl with the zit—Rebecca or Rachel or Rochelle—morphs smaller and smaller, then growl pig, lizard, rat, as she scurries by, the bite of syllables making us lick our lips, hungry for more.
Under black-blossom clouds, we link arms for selfies and tip noses to catch bubble-gum scents in the breeze, scavenge communion wafers in chapel and spit them into our hands. We cross fingers in confession and kiss broad-shouldered boys with our purpled tongues, tangy and sweet. We nuzzle, teeth sharpened, eyes always open.
We wait, shifting like shadows, until Rebecca or Rachel or Rochelle’s spot on the bus sits empty, and classmates offer heart emojis and candlelight vigils, our power a warning, a thirst, a howl echoing in the sky.
At night, cell phones clasped to our chests, we stroke tuffs of down, thick as cream along our ears and throats—then make crosses in the air because we’re not stupid girls, not silly girls, we know about survival of the fittest, the wild terror of existence, and the appetite for flesh that’ll rise again tomorrow.
About the Author
Dawn Miller
Dawn Miller is the winner of the 2024 Forge Literary Magazine Flash Fiction Contest, 2024 winner of the Toronto Star Short Story Contest, and Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025. Nominated for Best Small Fictions and The Pushcart Prize, her stories can be found in many journals and anthologies. She is the proud recipient of a 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Find her online at www.dawnmillerwriter.com
Erin Bondo, February 2025: Third Prize
Eloise Writes as the World Burns
by Erin Bondo
As rockets fall like rain on the southern counties – it is safe, for now, in the North – she drops a bomb on the fictional McElroy farmhouse. A necessary evil, they said. She strikes necessary from the page. It is too early for line edits, but evil is evil, she thinks, as the timbers crack and give.
*
When she wants to scream, she puts them on the lips of Mae MacEwan, who screamed as the soldiers ripped her son from her arms. But she must give these screams to the present, for this is where her own grief keens, day after night after day. Mae MacEwan is screaming as her world rends in two.
*
The radio sputters with news of renewed ground activity and she tears down the walls of Avignon, as if she can force the onslaught away, rake the invading troops eastward across the war room table with her words. She wonders if they are using paper maps now that the grid is compromised, because then they are not so different: both playing God on paper.
*
At the Episcopal church two streets over, the congregation is mid-recitation when an unnamed antagonist firebombs the nave. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. As the flames consume the altar, she plucks the Browns’ youngest from her pew – she cannot bear the girl’s burning flesh on the page. She sends more ambulances, more fire brigades, more volunteers, but the city still burns and burns.
*
Each night, she gathers them – the Browns, the MacEwans, the McElroys – hides them in cramped cellars and heaving underground stations, hopes her family will benefit somehow from this authorial benevolence. If they make it through the night, so do we. She repeats it like a mantra until she is written in past tense.
About the Author
Erin Bondo grew up in rural Ontario, Canada on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabek and now lives in Scotland. She has been longlisted for the Welkin Mini prize and has work forthcoming in the BFFA and Flash Fiction Festival anthologies. Find her on Bluesky @erinbondo.com