Winners

Debra A Daniel October 2022 Highly Commended

In The Darkest Dark She Takes My Sleep

by Debra A Daniel

“Get up,” my grandmother says. “It’s storming. The lights are out.”

I want to say, “Of course, they are. It’s the middle of the night,” but I don’t. She’d tell my mother, and I’d be punished for sassing.

Whenever it storms, my grandmother drags her rocking chair into the hallway. There are no windows. She can’t see what’s coming. She makes me sit with her until the danger of lightning death passes.

In the dark, she recites her storm rules. No bobby pins in my hair. Lightning searches for metal. No petting my dog. Lightning seeks out animals, even jittery ones like chihuahuas. No going into the bathroom no matter how bad I have to pee. Lightning can burst through faucets and drown you in electricity.

I want to ask why she only wakes me and not my mother who’s sleeping in her pink bedroom without my father who isn’t home in the middle of the night.

I want to say I have a math test and went to bed reciting formulas for circles—area, circumference, radius—so I won’t fail, but now I’ll be sleepy and confused by circles that spin me until I’m helpless.

But I don’t speak. I sit near the creak of the rocker and listen to her story about sisters she knew when she was eleven. Sisters struck by a bolt straight out of a blue sky. Sisters who never saw it coming.

“You must watch in bright of day,” my grandmother says. “and darkest night. Especially then. That’s when no one realizes the lights have gone out and you’ve lost your power.”

The black storm surrounds us. I hold onto my pillow and listen to pour of rain, the whipping wind, and, from behind her bedroom door, the sleeping hush of my mother.

About the Author

Debra Daniel, from South Carolina, sings in a band with her husband. Publications include: The Roster, (Ad Hoc Fiction, highly commended for the Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash, 2019), Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher (novel, Muddy Ford Press), The Downward Turn of August (poetry, Finishing Line) As Is (poetry, Main Street Rag), With One Eye on the Cows, Things Left and Found by the Side of the Road, Los Angeles Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Kakalak, Emrys, Pequin, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, and Gargoyle. Awards include The Los Angeles Review, Bacopa, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, and SC Poetry Fellowships. Her second novella-in-flash A Family of Great Falls was shortlisted in the 2021 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Awards and was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in July 2021. She also won third prize in the February 2022 Bath Flash Fiction Award.

Sara Hills October 2022 Highly Commended

A Beachcomber’s Guide to Desert Grief

by Sara Hills

The boy on his bike is a shark. Each clump of grass? Seaweed. Each broken crash of cholla? A jellyfish. The ground is water—that’s what you tell yourself—not hard-packed desert dirt.

You throw yourself into the waves and float, waiting to feel lighter, waiting for the boy to pass. But he doesn’t. He rolls up next to you and stops, hovering there with his sharp fin, scenting for blood.

You’re here to feel the salt spray on your face, taste the tang of summer on your lips, sense the sun shimmering on water. You’re here to listen, and he’s ruining it.

Doesn’t he know that each inch of this ocean is a cure? That time is held in each grain of sand? That if you get quiet enough, the seashells will whisper your sister’s secrets to you?

They might, but not with him here.

The cool of his shadow falls across your face. His breath is root beer soda and barbecue sauce.

You play at being invisible until he touches you, until his words bubble to the surface.

‘Not dead,’ he says and laughs.

When you open your eyes, you see his bike tire as a whale’s eye. See his mouth, a pufferfish. See that he’s not going to leave. So you leave first.

Each footstep sucks the wet sand and the ocean slowly recedes behind you, out of your memory. The wheels of the boy’s bike follow, spokes flickering, tires spinning up droplets of dust.

For one last glimpse, it’s sunlight on water—every chance at being washed clean—then it’s gone. And it’s just the hard desert dirt all around you, miles and miles of dry despair.

About the Author

Sara Hills is the author of The Evolution of Birds, winner of the 2022 Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection, and co-author of a collaborative novella-in-flash forthcoming with Ad Hoc Fiction in 2023. Her stories have won the QuietManDave Prize for flash nonfiction, the Retreat West quarterly prize, and been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 and The Best Small Fictions. Her work is widely published in anthologies and magazines, including SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, Fractured Lit, Cease Cows, Flash Frog, Splonk, and Reckon Review. Originally from the Sonoran Desert, Sara lives in Warwickshire, UK and tweets from @sarahillswrites.

Rachel Blake June 2022 First Prize

Sequelae

by Rachel Blake

She waited for the neighbours to leave for work or driving out along the twisty roads by Minnehaha Falls to a lay-by with wooden chips where girls were dragged, sat in the car, bent her head down into the coat on her lap and screamed. It was never long enough, lips never wide enough to peel the skin from the bones where it itched her skull. The car wasn’t soundproof, it would raise an alarm. People were everywhere, except when you needed them. She’d tried roller coasters, pitching her voice with others down rattling tracks, flung into the side feeling beaten, left, and a kind woman, a mother, asking afterwards: are you alright? Beside railroad tracks when the train shuttled past, screaming with the screeching wheels, the electrical breath hot in her tangled hair, but people were in the windows, perhaps, where she couldn’t see. You could cry anywhere, and tears were there somewhere, but how to get to them, smothered in her plastic wrap voice, eyes of glass and waxwork teeth. She walked through galleries, but art was for the artists, grew the scream if it wasn’t yours, added to it. She painted root-like flesh, faces with smeared, watercolour features, a glance out of the corner of an eye, a smirk and, on the other side of the paper—trees, shifting in patterns of light. She wanted to lie on the ground and stare into those leaves and scream into that light. But they were gone and she couldn’t look, didn’t want to know—not until she could find somewhere private to bleed.

About the Author

Rachel Blake was born in New Delhi, raised in Minneapolis, and has lived in San Francisco, Paris, New Orleans, most recently in the UK and is now in transit to New York. She is always looking for adventure and has worked as a dance teacher and therapist. Her undergraduate degree was in Women’s Studies, and she has an MSW from NYU. One of her short stories was published in Open City, and she has recently completed a novel. She lives with her husband and twelve year old son.

Madeline Byrne June 2022 Second Prize

Between

by Madeline Byrne

Juliet cleans houses. The wealthy, high-ceilinged kind. She navigates hallways whose walls have absorbed the smell of absinthe, the spritz of champagne, the spell of lovemaking. She changes bedsheets and breathes in clouds of perfume, so potent, they pass through walls like full-bodied ghosts. There’s music, too. The walls take it in, every spin of the vinyl, every child’s violin lesson. Every woman who stumbles home after the opera, drunk and singing and making her lover laugh, cringe.

When Juliet cleans, she leaves a little part of herself behind. She is nowhere and everywhere at once; a payslip in the housekeeper’s tray, a strand of hair in the coat closet that causes her employer’s mistress to worry. Invisible cells of skin in the dustpan. When she walks the city at night, she becomes no one. A traceless blue shadow, an outline.

There was a time when she would walk halfway home before waving for the bus. Listen to the ebbs and exchanges that leaked over café terraces, the notes of heightened, private conversations drifting out of upper windows like the hems of curtains. It had been a time before Michel, before the subdued city. Now, it was a place where one fell into two of four sorts. The visible and the invisible, the dancers and the ones who turned their ear away from the music, toward the wireless with its shifting dials and talk of war.

When Juliet gets home, she watches her son sleeping. She lights a cigarette. Outside, a lone, late-night musician attempts to penetrate the night with the keys of a piano. Inside, the radio murmurs ceaselessly, filling the walls with voices.

About the Author

Madeline Byrne is an emerging writer based in Brisbane, Australia. A former bookseller, she now works as marketing assistant for the little-but-fierce university press, UQP. Madeline lives on the river with her husband and their British Shorthair, Obi. .

Abigail Williams June 2022 Third Prize

Don’t mistake me for your crabapple

by Abigail Williams

You are in the garden, kneeling among scarlet lupin spears. Savage, you stab the soil with your fork, weed out green tips with dark delight. I find myself lacing the edges of the lawn, shifting from one damp paver to the next. I am ornamental. Like your crabapple which refuses to blossom, I am in the wrong place.

‘Sam’s doing well at school,’ I offer. I hand these pearls, these claims to you, and I feel like my daughter presenting pieces of gravel in the pink crook of her palm, watching me intensely to check I understand their value. You hold the words for long enough to please me, before tipping them out of your ears. It is dangerous to show interest in the grandchildren. I might ask you for something. You fend me off with a long pole.

‘Carol and Jon had theirs again. A whole week.’ You look at me as if I sent them. ‘Carol was exhausted.’

I remember when you planted the lupins. And the hellebores on the shady side. The dahlias and the bee balm. You carved a new shape for the lawn, and you make dad crop it to lush stubs: US marine-green. Your garden is curated. You weigh it daily, your roving eye bleak and calculating. Do the plants feel themselves suspended in your balance, I wonder? Do they sense the threat of the fork, the severing of their clinging arms?

When they are tiny, you are tender. You patrol the borders with your slug scissors. You blanket buds when frost threatens like a mother wrapping winter’s child in a warm towel. But they are like me. Their petals will brown. Their bloom will fade. They will need you too much.

Always the shadow of your fork stripes our shoulders.

About the Author

Abigail Williams (@scribblingabby) lives and writes in Devon. She spent twenty years as a Marketing Director in Leeds, and is now wrestling with her Creative Writing MA dissertation at the University of Exeter. She won the Cranked Anvil Short Story Competition in February 2022, and the Evesham Festival of Words Short Story Competition in March. She was longlisted in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize in spring 2022. Abby has been published in the journal Riptide and the anthology, More Gallimaufry.

Sudha Balagopal June 2022 Highly Commended

On Our Daughter’s Wedding Day

by Sudha Balagopal

I don’t miss wearing bright colors―red, orange, purple―or jasmine in my hair. I don’t miss the elaborate maroon bindis on my forehead. I don’t even miss the taali you knotted around my neck at our marriage ceremony―the one the priest commanded me to remove after death claimed you.

I do miss being a part of the religious pujas from which I must keep my distance as if I’m tainted, as if I’m contagious, as if my cursed ill-fortune can spread.

And, I miss you.

I miss you with an ache in my body’s cradle, where our daughter grew for nine months. I miss you because I cannot shower our child with love on this, her special day. I miss you because I’m told I shouldn’t stand on the mandapam where she’ll place her hand in her groom’s, where she’ll take the saptapadi―the seven steps of marriage―where her groom will tie her taali.

I miss you because if you were here, I wouldn’t be expected to watch our daughter’s nuptials from afar, shredding a moist, muslin handkerchief. I miss you because I’m instructed to stay tucked away, like a pariah, while your brother will take your place at the ceremony and his wife mine―as proxies for you and me.

I miss you, so I heave uneven breaths, then toss the handkerchief in the bin. I miss you, so I adjust the pleats of my sari. I miss you, so I straighten my spine, walk up to the mandapam. I miss you so I stand next to our daughter and her groom, offer them our blessings, yours and mine.

About the Author

Sudha Balagopal is honored to have her fiction in many fine literary journals including Smokelong Quarterly, Split Lip and CRAFT. Her highly commended novella in flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. Her work is forthcoming in both Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions, 2022.

Olwen Wilson June 2022 Highly Commended

The Shape of the Situation in Apartment 23C on a Sunday in September

by Olwen Wilson

Sick of soup-stained shirts, unending heartburn, and his wife’s attentive new friend from down the hall, the Horizontal Man decides to attempt standing up. He declares this to the Parallel Woman while reclining on their contorted couch, and out of earshot of their Upside-Down Child. She doesn’t ask why. She hasn’t asked him anything at all since that tall, hot-liquid-loving neighbour moved in.

“I’ll get the Vertical Vixen to help!” the Parallel Woman says through her gummy-grin.

“No! Not her! Ask the Spiralling Boy in 17D,” the Horizontal Man shouts.

His wife’s cheeks blush pink as she flees from his side. Then red when she knocks their Allen-key-assembled coffee table with her knee.

He hears her send the Upside-Down Child to fetch his foe from the Perpendicular Widow’s old apartment. She adds a lunch invitation as thanks before pushing their child toward 23E.

The click of the stove coming to life tells him his wife’s serving soup for their midday meal. He notices his antacids toppled on the table in front of him, beyond his reach.

When the Vertical Vixen arrives, the Horizontal Man can’t get up from the couch to greet her, nor does he want to. The Parallel Woman’s fawning over the Vertical Vixen’s towering frame reminds him of why he does.

Neither of them offers him any help in getting to his feet. Not even when he won’t contain his grunts and groans while scooching himself higher on the cushions.

They’re too busy swapping stew recipes.

Too busy complimenting the other’s smile.

Too busy declaring their undying love for the world above his view.

All he can do is stare at them sideways as his Upside-Down Child joins them to form a new trio.

About the Author

Olwen Wilson is a writer from Canada whose enthusiasm for finding joy in ordinary moments is contagious. She loves to be surrounded by loud laughter, unread books, paint and pens, cuddly cats, warm blankets, and birds singing outside her window. Her first published story, More Sludge Than Pink Popsicle Sticks, is in the Flash Fiction Festival Four anthology. Find Olwen online at olwenwilson.com and only occasionally on Twitter @Olwen_Allwen

Novella in Flash, 2022 Award – Winners and Commended

Many congratulations to all. We’re looking forward to when all these wonderful novellas in flash fiction are published by Ad Hoc Fiction. Read judge Michelle Elvy’s comments on all. And our Award Round Up.
First prize: Lessons at the Water’s Edge: by Caroline Greene
Caroline Greene @cgreene100 is an English Language teacher who’s also worked as an editor and features writer, and as a fund-raiser in the theatre. Her work has
been performed at Liars League, and appeared in the Fish Anthology 2011, Flash Magazine, Splonk and FlashBack Fiction, as well as anthologies from Bath FlashFiction, the National Flash Fiction Day, Flash Fiction Festival and Retreat West.

Runner-Up: It Felt Like Everything by K.S. Dyal
K.S. Dyal is a writer and lawyer from Washington, D.C. She has stories in or coming from SmokeLong Quarterly, JMWW, CHEAP POP, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere. She won CutBank’s 2021 Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest and placed second in Bath Flash Fiction’s spring 2021 contest. She has previously published under the name K.S. Lokensgard.

Runner-Up: The Twisted Wheel by David Swann
David Swann’s flash fiction collection Stronger Faster Shorter was published in 2015. In 2016 he won the Bridport Flash Fiction Competition, his eighth success in a Prize that he judged in 2013. His other publications include The Privilege of Rain (based on his experiences as a Writer in Residence in jail, and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award) and The Last Days of Johnny North, a collection of his prize winning short fiction. His novella in flash Season of Bright Sorrow, illustrated by Sam Hubbard won first prize in the Bath Flash Fiction Novella in Flash Award in 2021 and is published by Ad Hoc Fiction. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Chichester, where he teaches modules on fiction, poetry, and screenwriting.

Highly Commended: Essence by Christopher Drew
Christopher M Drew lives in Sheffield, UK with his wife and two children. His flash fiction has been published widely in journals such as The Forge Literary Magazine, Splonk, Lunate Fiction, trampset, and SmokeLong Quarterly. His work has featured in Best British & Irish Flash Fiction (2018-19) and Best Microfiction (2021), and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net. He has served as editor for historical flash fiction journal Flashback Fiction, and is currently Guest Editor for the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2022. You can connect with Chris on Twitter @cmdrew81, or through his website https://chrisdrew81.wixsite.com/cmdrew81.

Highly Commended: Gull Shit Alley and Other Roads to Hell by Jupiter Jones
Jupiter Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions. She is the two-time winner of the Colm Tóibín International Prize, and her stories have been published by Aesthetica, Brittle Star, Fish, Scottish Arts, and Parthian. Her first novella-in-flash, The Death and Life of Mrs Parker was published by Ad Hoc Fiction and her second, Lovelace Flats by Reflex Press @jupiterjonz

Commended: Presence by Kristen Loesch
Kristen Loesch is an award-winning writer and novelist. Her debut historical novel, THE PORCELAIN DOLL, is out now in the UK (Allison & Busby) and is forthcoming in the US (Berkley) and in eight other territories in 2023. Originally from San Francisco, she now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. Twitter: @kristenloesch

Commended: All Their Favourite Stories by Slawka G. Scarso
Slawka G. Scarso works as a copywriter, translator and marketing lecturer and has published several books on Italian wine. Her short fiction in English has appeared/is forthcoming in Mslexia, Ellipsis Zine, Scrawl Place, Spelk, FlashBack Fiction, Fractured Lit, Bending Genres, Five Minutes, Firewords and others. She was shortlisted in the 2022 NFFD Microfiction Competition and longlisted in the 2022 Reflex Press Novella Award. Her flash fiction has also appeared in anthologies such as Snow Crow (Ad Hoc Fiction), Flash Fiction Festival Anthology Volume Four (Ad Hoc Fiction), and in the forthcoming In the Belly of the Whale (Ellipsis Zine).She lives between Castel Gandolfo, a village perched on a dormant volcano near Rome, and Milan. You can find her on Twitter as @nanopausa and on www.nanopausa.com.

Louise Mangos February 2022 First Prize

A Roadmap of Womanhood

by Louise Mangos

The vein travels east from her cleavage across her right breast. Its trail is blue-green, like the motorways in her faded, water-damaged AA Atlas from the nineties, before everyone started using smartphone apps. It resembles the M1 where it meets the M25 at Bricket Wood, passing two freckles and a cherry angioma. After the junction, it takes a sharp turn south and ring-roads her areola, the place on her body where three babes have suckled, partners have fluttered their curious fingers and slid their passionate tongues. Frogmore. London Colney. South Mimms. The vein then travels eastwards horizontally before fading under her armpit into the ancient woodlands of Epping Forest. It transports her iron, her anger, her waste. It has pumped away the pain of mastitis in a steaming hot shower, felt the soft silk of an underwired C-cup, been prodded by doctors searching for cancerous nodules. The vessel should be blood red, but through the curious filter of human skin untouched by sunlight, it becomes the emerald green of a heaving swamp. Once fascinating, it is now shunned by partners, repulsive to lovers, frowned upon by friends. Today this roadmap is for her eyes only. After the fired flush of menopause has chilled her skin to marble, it remains a testament to the men who have overstepped her boundaries, crossed the central reservation, pulled in to a coffee stop for a quick pick-me-up. She looks at herself in the mirror, parked naked on a double yellow line. She studies the tattoo of her womanhood and wonders if she can do a U-turn, take the M4 all the way to the southwest, where there is nothing between her liver-spotted skin and the pot-holed coastal road except the salty tears of the Atlantic Ocean.

About the Author

Louise writes novels, short stories and flash fiction, which have won prizes, placed on shortlists, and have been read out on BBC radio. Her short fiction has appeared in more than twenty print anthologies and magazines. Her latest novel will be published in spring 2022. She lives at the foot of a Swiss Alp with her Kiwi husband and two sons. You can read more of her short fiction on her website www.louisemangos.com and connect with her on Twitter @LouiseMangos.

Iona Rule February 2022 Second Prize

Edging

by Iona Rule

I didn’t want to be the type of person who went to Carrie, but ultimately I did. I found her in The Anchor, sitting at a ring-marked table, cradling a rum and coke. The stool bucked beneath me as I sat opposite her, stumbling over my stale words. It didn’t matter. She knew why I’d come. I shuffled the beer mats like tarot cards, then gave in. I whispered against her hair, which looped in a question mark by her ear,

“Can I see it?”

She nodded, resigned, as though she’d expected it, but had hoped I’d surprise her.

I took her home. Her gaze lingered on the dead cactus on the counter. Before I could ask, she removed her jumper and turned her back to me. There it was. Running from the nape of her neck, down her vertebrae, was a black hole. The emptiness stretched away, beckoning to something inside me that howled. I stood on the brink. People said if you entered one, you could access an alternate universe, or travel in time. I could return to a place where Sara hadn’t left and I could still keep a cactus alive. If this didn’t happen, if I only floated in the dark, my atoms pulled asunder, it would be enough.

But I couldn’t do it. I steadied myself on her shoulder and pulled back. We had sex instead. That basic human instinct anchored me as I stared from the edge.

After it was over, I felt empty, like that hole had taken something after all.

As she dressed I asked her how many people had jumped into her. She shrugged.

“I’ve lost count.”

I knew there was another world inside her, one where she dressed alone, watered my cactus, then closed the door behind her.

About the Author

Iona Rule has a birthmark but she’s 97% sure it isn’t a portal to an alternate universe. She has been BIFFY50 nominated and shortlisted in TSS Publishing, Cambridge Flash Prize, Fractured Lit and Retreat West. Her writing can be found in Epoch Press, The Phare and Ellipses Zine.