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
Winners: Novella-in-Flash Award ,2025
Huge congratulations to our 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Award winners, the first, second and third prizes and the two highly commended, selected by Bath Flash Fiction Awards founder, Jude Higgins. Read Jude’s comments about them here. The top three novellas will be published by Ad Hoc Fiction and will be launched at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol (18th-20th July).
First Prize: In the Dark Eyes of the Rabbit by Debra A. Daniel
Debra A. Daniel, is the author of two novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls and The Roster (Ad Hoc Fiction), 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.’
Runner-up: Spin of the Triangle by Stephanie Carty
Stephanie Carty is a writer and clinical psychologist in the UK. Her short fiction is widely published and placed in competitions. Her novella-in-flash Three Sisters of Stone won a Saboteur Award and her short fiction collection The Peculiarities of Yearning won an Eyelands Book Award. She has published two psychological suspense novels and two writers’ guides – Inside Fictional Minds on the psychology of character and The Writing Mirror on analysing your writing to better understand yourself.
Runner Up:The Lives of the Dead by Fiona McKay
Fiona McKay is the author of the Novella-in-Flash The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), and the Flash Fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023). Her Flash Fiction is in Bath Flash Fiction Award anthologies, Lost Balloon, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
She is on X (formerly Twitter) @fionaemckayryan and Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social
Highly Commended:: Codewords by Justine Sweeney
Justine Sweeney is an Irish writer with an MA in Creative Writing from University of Hull. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Dublin Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and the Bath Flash Anthology. Her first Novella-in-flash, Codewords, is a work of fiction which draws on her experience growing up in Belfast during the political conflict known as the Troubles.
Highly Commended:Playing with Fire by Bettyjoyce Nash
BettyJoyce Nash writes essays, articles, and stories. Her work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, North Dakota Quarterly, Reckon Review, Across the Margin, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, Everybody Here is Kin (Madville Publishing, 2023), was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize. Her writing has also been recognized with fellowships from artists’ retreats, including the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland. A chapter from her flash novella, Playing With Fire, appears in The Weather Where You Are, Bath Flash Fiction Volume Eight. She lives in Charlottesville, VA.
Kathryn Aldridge-Morris: October 2024 First Prize
Visiting Lenin’s Tomb
by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Tiyshe! No talking! The soldiers put fingers purple with cold to their cracked lips. You are here to pay homage! Da zdravstvuyet Leninizm! But this is your ex-husband’s house, not the dim lit mausoleum on Red Square, and those guards, eyes the colour of dill, mouths downturned sickles, your daughters. How they’ve changed but not changed since you were disappeared, and he threatened to section you, should you ever return. Exiled to the end of the Piccadilly Line, sixteen stops away from their entire childhood. Move along! Dvigatsya! You want to slow, to take in the red granite walls, the unfamiliar family photos, the smell of wet overcoat, but a celebrant with cyrillic curls for a moustache tells you to wait outside, it’s for the best, they don’t want a scene, and as you reach Lenin’s tomb —some honeymoon—you don’t yet know you’re shuffling through the few remaining days of Gorbachev’s Russia. You oblige and stand in the snow, but your nerves are in insurrection. How dare this stranger—yet another man—stand between you and your daughters? You grip the letters you’ll give them today, letters to you from their father, letters that prove the mind-games and control; control over what you wore, where you went, who you saw. You were a good mother! You did try to see them! The hearse pulls up, his coffin flanked by the floral tribute he picked out himself: BEST DAD. A crowd swells at the foot of Gorky Street. In weeks a drunk will climb on top of a tank to declare a new era, but for now your daughters turn their backs on you, light Kino cigarettes and leave iron blue contrails that dissipate in the cold Essex air.
About the Author
Kathryn Aldridge-Morris’ flash fiction and essays have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Stanchion Magazine, Paris Lit Up, Flash Frog, Splonk, New Flash Fiction Review and elsewhere. She has won several awards, including The Forge’s Flash Nonfiction competition and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50. She is the recent recipient of an Arts Council England Award to write her novella, and her debut collection of flash fiction, Cold Toast, will be published by Dahlia Publishing in spring 2025.
Alys Hobbs: October 2024 Second Prize
There You Are
by Alys Hobbs
You wake in the carpark of a long-forgotten Little Chef. In the chain-link there are clumps of things that once had feathers and tails and chickweed is coming up through the cracks in the concrete. You wake in a layby. You wake in a cul-de-sac to a hob-knuckled rapping, but no-one is there when you open the door. You wake in a Stopping Place. You wake at the edge of a bare-plucked field with your neck in a knot, forgetting where you were. Sometimes when you try to sleep among the sweet-sour smell of yourself you pretend it’s not cars rushing by but the ocean rushing in, picking you up, bearing you off. You wake by a reservoir and rain is falling or the trees are shedding their needles in the coming of winter or someone is tapping, tapping on the roof, calling you out. In a drive-thru bin you purge your flotsam; the cans, the tins, the clusters, the clods; the dried-out wet-wipes, the gummed-up noodle cups, the buttons and bones and bottle caps. You wake in the crook of the woods, your fingers working deep under the seat-covers like you’re digging for something buried in the damp. You wake in a Welcome Break and the moon is a hot-white hangnail and you taste salt in the split where your mouth used to be. You wake by a lakeside. You’ve been here before. You wake in the quiet. You’ll go here again. You wake in the thin light to the sound of geese leaving. The windows are so fogged with your own breath that you can’t look out, but you think it must really be something to see.
About the Author
Alys’ writing has featured in anthologies including The Fiends in the Furrows (Volume 2), Egaeus Press’ Unquiet Grove collection, and Kandisha Press’ Under her Black Wings – as well as magazines and journals such as The Ghastling and Popshot. She collects interesting rocks and bones, loves to cook and finds inspiration in folklore and liminal spaces.
Samantha Kent: October 2024, Third Prize
There Are Times When We Talk Without Talking
by Samantha Kent
Her nieces arrive first. All three of them, mid-twenties, clad in looping scarves and the guilt of being absent since their mid-teens.
Then her son, his eyes trained on the notices pinned to the walls, on the white rectangle of sky out the window.
His pregnant wife, his pretty daughters, their vitality as sharp and painful as a knife.
Finally her husband, back from pacing the sterile corridors. Knuckles white, eyes red, fingers tobacco yellow.
The room is warm – nauseating – but her feet, she says, are cold.
One by one her visitors ask if she’d like another blanket. One by one they are informed by the others, in jovial tones, that she already has three, ten, a thousand.
Over her dying body – because it is dying, now, the doctors are sure – the visitors draw a line around the thing they can’t face talking about and take a step further back for good measure.
You’re how old? Wow. How’s big school treating you?
That’s frustrating. Do you think your buyers will stick around?
No time off in between jobs, no. If only!
They loved it. They’re definitely cruise people now.
He’s good. Just hungover, or he would have come along too.
Every now and then the visitors force themselves to look down at the woman propped up against the pillows, to return her slumped and crooked smile.
It is easy to wonder how she might be feeling, beyond the icy feet and the aching lungs and the wounds from the failed cannula. But it is hard – it is impossible – to ask.
In time, snow begins to fall, and conversation turns to the weather.
About the Author
Samantha Kent is an Associate Creative Director and aspiring novelist (aren’t we all?). She lives with her husband and cat in suburban Berkshire, enjoys hiking and escape rooms, and eats faaar too much chocolate.
Gemma Church: October 2024 Highly Commended
GODETIAS
by Gemma Church
Eight letters.
I’d never heard of GODETIAS until I started listening to Countdown. Never watched it neither cos I was at school… or bunking off, if you want the truth.
Anyway, two contestants (complete nerds) pick nine random letters. Then, they’ve got to get the longest word in 30 seconds while the Countdown clock ticks down.
Sounds dumb, right? But I’ve learned loads of new words.
GODETIAS comes up a lot because certain letter combos are more likely.
ASTEROID.
RODENTIA.
ORDINATE.
Eight letters.
Popular and anagrams of each other.
FAVOURITE.
Nine letters.
Claire’s the favourite. She’s smart. Went to uni. Left me with…
RELATIONS.
The most popular niner.
PHYSICIAN.
Nine letters but rare.
They came into my room today, RELATIONS and PHYSICIAN.
I was annoyed cos they turned the TV off.
PHYSICIAN spewed out loads of (nine-plus) words that I couldn’t understand. I stopped listening, cos I was pissed about missing the end of Countdown.
When PHYSICIAN left, RELATIONS started arguing. Again.
The worst thing was, I had to lie here, listening to the same old…
BULLSHIT.
Eight letters.
Countdown allows swear words, if they’re in the dictionary.
VEGETABLE.
Niner. Not popular. What RELATIONS called me.
But they’re wrong. I’m still in here and I’ve found something I’m good at and I’m going to go on Countdown and prove that I’m no…
WASTER.
Six letters. Crap Countdown word. But everyone’s FAVOURITE word to describe me.
Want to know the worst bit about lying here?
Claire hasn’t visited.
That’s hit me hard.
Harder than when Claire blocked me on her socials.
But not as hard as the tree that I drove RELATIONS’ car into.
I just wanted someone to see me.
Now, I’m trapped in my head.
Listening to Countdown.
Praying Claire visits and, maybe, brings me a bunch of GODETIAS.
About the Author
Gemma lives and works in Cambridgeshire with her husband, two sons, and one dog. She loves all things science fact and fiction with two degrees in physics and currently leads content at a quantum computing company. She has an Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing from Cambridge University, studied at The Faber Academy and is working on a sci-fi children’s novel with The Golden Egg Academy. Gemma’s SFF short stories appear in numerous publications. She is also a very proud Countdown teapot owner and discovered the word GODETIAS (amongst others) during her spell on the show. Find her @gemmakchurch.