Again, we were thrilled to receive so many entries from around the globe – about a hundred more than the June round – seven hundred and forty eight – submitted from twenty eight different countries:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Luxembourg, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Qatar, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States
When Jude Higgins asked me to judge her Bath Flash Fiction Award, my initial excitement was checked by schedules. It would be October, my week of potential reading of finalists would follow my already booked trip to New York City to read at the venerable KGB Bar. Not once, but two evenings, Friday and Saturday, for both the ever-exciting F-BOMB series, and also the Best Small Fictions event. It was an incredible trip, but I arrived home depleted, exhausted. And now I had the task of turning to the 50 awaiting stories, the vetted Long List of Bath Flash Fiction semi-finalists.
As I read through them the first time, I was stunned. Not a single story that didn’t fit, that was not rightly placed among the stunning 50. I started sweating, drawn into these unique landscapes, the unusual words, startling sentence fragments, the odd characters. These were highly unique and remarkably crafted stories. I’ve been a judge more than a few times, also have edited for several magazines (and still do). These were not “normal” submissions. So, I got to work. I read them each two more times, separating them with a numerical system. Narrowing down the 50 stories, over the next three days, to an eventual Short List of 20.
Read in Full
by Helen Rye
Our land was beautiful. You should have seen the cherry blossom in the springtime, the foot of our mountain was clothed in it. And the sweetness of the figs in autumn – there is nothing like it anywhere.
Figs were our country’s first gift to the world. Anzuki, Halabi, Bouksati, Oubied – such poetry there is in the names, and in the soft, ripened flesh you could taste the warmth of the sun that falls on the land of my grandfather’s fathers.
We burnt the trees to keep our child from dying of cold, the winter after the power went down. My husband wept as he carried the branches from the orchard, but the snows were coming and we had nothing left to burn.
He spared one.
The last fruit was ripe on its branches and the leaves had almost gone, the day the rebels took him away.
I took my son to my sister in the city, but then the bombs came. They fell on the library. On the marketplace. On the internet café at the corner of the next street. On the hospital. On the people who were fleeing from the hospital.
Our lives compressed to the twelve-metre span of this boat.
I called my son Ocean, because once I loved the sea. Now our land lies scorched and turned toward the earth, and ten thousand have fallen like leaves beneath these waters.
Did you know that the fig is not really a fruit? No, it is a flower that has turned in on itself, so that all of the beauty and goodness lies hidden on the inside. All the colour that could in another life have become bright petals is wrapped in darkness, away from the world. But it is in there.
It is in there.
Helen Rye lives in Norwich, where she juggles part-time work with parenting and writing. She has benefited from tutoring by some of the absurdly talented writers who live in the city. Her first piece of flash fiction was shortlisted for the 2015 Bridport Prize. She is writing a novel, very slowly, and the occasional picture-book text.
She has loved writing since she was a child but returned to it only relatively recently via workplaces including a physics lab, a needle exchange and a theatre company.
by Christopher M Drew
You twist your tiptoes into the textured edge of the board and rock up and down in perfect pace with the lullaby lilt of water far below.
Hush. Hush.
You taste sweat and urine and skin and blood and inhale the sterile chemical remains of a thousand nameless souls that float beneath you like flotsam.
Breathe.
You close your eyes as the massless void inside you dilates like a black hole and collapses, pulling you into its gravity.
You bend your knees and push, and push, and push.
Your arms stretch in an ichthys over your head and curve through the apex of the dive like a breaching dolphin.
This is the moment, in the soft blue silence between the leap and the fall, when the world ceases its incessant spin. When agony and ecstasy fuse into numb oblivion and all you can feel is…
…the rush of hot air over your skin. The fizz of adrenalin through your blood. The shock of your flattened palms, as pitiless and precise as a scalpel, slicing the surface of the water with a rip like torn tissue.
You disappear piece by piece by piece until you are submerged, invisible, spinning through the viscous fluid like the sombre cycle of the seasons.
Light, dark, light, dark.
You link your arms around tucked knees, empty your lungs in silent scream, and ascend inexorably towards the shattered surface.
In. Out. Breathe.
You lie still, weightless, and listen to the muted white noise of splashing, laughter, music, life. Your heartbeat slows, echoing the rhythmic lap of water in your ears.
Hush. Hush.
You cradle your arms and try to remember the weight of him, the tufts of his satin hair, his skin like folded silk, his infinite smile.
But all you can feel is the fall.
Chris has always been a writer. His earliest memory is composing a short poem in primary school (which could be described as flash fiction, although he didn’t know it at the time) about a deer running through the woods. In between writing, he works for a University and spends as much time as possible with his wife and two children. He is currently writing another flash, two short stories, and has an idea for a novella-in-flash that almost certainly won’t be ready by January. He is also working on three novels, but really needs to pick one and finish it.
by Julianna Holland
Through the smoke and the opaque mantle of my cataracts and bee veil I note that the waxing honeycomb has filled with a hatch of eggs, the mass of white absurdly distinct. All my life I have been hounded by the gleam of whiteness. In the snowfall of my childhood, a ram’s bone remains in a ditch, the pearl germs in my children’s teething gums, the hoar evinced itself in sharp focus.
It has dogged me since my fifth year when my brother died one Sunday in spring. That afternoon I stood before my mother and the still baby in her bedroom gloom holding a spray of tiny, white buds. A tea tray on the dressing table glistened with a spoon, half-harrowed in the sugar, tempting as a spade in sand. I ventured closer holding out my wilting flowers. A meagre offering. My lowered stare took in her swollen chest and, startling me, her breasts cried first. Milk tears spilled and spread across the strained fabric of her nightdress. My infantile bravery shattered. Dropping the white cluster on her bed, I ran from the room. I see them now, the same restive sprays, dancing boundless beyond the bulk of the hive. Were they meadowsweet or cow parsley or Queens Anne’s lace? I had neglected to learn the name of the spirited white flowers, paragons of remembrance, tenacious souvenirs of my boyhood. I turn to my wife and ask at last. ‘Baby’s breath’ is her reply and my mourning carries on.
Julianna Holland is a writer living and working in the North West of Ireland. She studied Film and Psychotherapy in Dublin and Galway.
Julianna is a member of The Sandy Field Writers’ Group based in County Sligo and has previously been shortlisted by Fish Publishing and The Bridport Prize.
by Caroline Reid
After I had my dog put down I went to the beach where I saw another black staffy chomping on frothy waves like she was that crazed with thirst and hunger she could have drank the ocean, eaten all the fish, dived to the bottom to feed on crays, munched her way through the Great Barrier Reef, before gobbling up the entire Pacific trash vortex. Then a squall of kids stormed out of the Life Savers Club, scaring the shit out of me in their red rashies, and when the staffy heard them she took one quick preserving look over her shoulder, plunged into the sea and paddled like mad. And I remembered my first dog, the way she took ill suddenly. After the fits you could smell the terror on her, metallic and wet like steel pipes left in the rain and I was hard on myself because I got more upset over that dog than my dad, who had died the previous summer. I’d watched him shrink to half his size in the hospital bed, wiping grey gunk from his mouth, holding my breath against foul smelling boils that erupted on him daily as if anger were its own revenge. I watched the staffy drift to safety further up the beach and I thought that when the oceans fish have dried up, the reefs are white as Styrofoam and there are only starving mobs of kids left, this is the way the last dog will go. Hounded by a herd of freckle-heads across blistering sands, she will be forced to dive beneath toxic waves before disappearing for good. I sat in the shallows and let the sand fill my knickers, knocked the top off a bottle of bourbon and bawled my bloody eyes out.
Caroline Reid wrote her first commissioned work for theatre twenty years ago and since then her plays, fiction and poetry have been consistently performed, broadcast and published. She has written for arts organisations, schools and community groups; and has created work alongside independent artists, artist with disabilities and young people. In 2016 she was writer-in-residence at the South Australian Writers Centre and a finalist in the South Australian Poetry Slam. She is currently working on her first novel. Caroline lives in Adelaide, where she loves to go walking with her family in the shade of her pink and green umbrella.
by Michelle Elvy
I dreamed I was a whale shark dreaming he was a boy dreaming he was a whale shark dreaming he was a boy dreaming he was a whale shark dreaming he was a boy. Illuminating. Diving. Soaring. All in one night, or maybe it was one hour, or even one minute. I dove down down down and found fluorescent charms swinging from the snouts of seahorses. I flew firecrackerfast, fearsome and jubilant at the dizzying depths and the iridescent shape of things. I fed on plankton but they weren’t plankton at all – they were morsels of delight, merry magical minstrels skipping on my tongue, pressing and lifting at the same time. Between bites (gapes, because there’s no chewing when you’re a whale shark) I napped and dreamed, and I was the boy, and I had a ladder, and I climbed and climbed and climbed. The ladder went up to the top of my house and beyond. It touched treetops and the salt of the sea-sky in the harbour. It exceeded the reach of my mother’s call, way out in the everdark of the night. I dove through silk raindrops and I was a whale shark again, pectoral fin browsing slippery sand. And then I was a boy again. Shifting back and forth, down and up: first tail swish, long and smooth and elegant like a shark but not a shark, then boy with hands – hands! – digging a mote of water for protection (naturally) around a castle, singing sea-lavender songs. As a whale shark, I dreamed the boy, and as a boy, I dreamed the whale shark. And so on. Blueblack of ocean to blackblue of sky. Down and back up. Swimming laddering lunging climbing.
I can be anything in my dreams.
I open my mouth and swallow the stars.
A writer and manuscript editor based in New Zealand, Michelle Elvy edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Blue Five Notebook. She is chair of NZ’s National Flash Fiction Day and Assistant Editor of the critically acclaimed Best Small Fictions series. This year, she is assembling an anthology of New Zealand flash, with Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe. Currently in East Africa, Michelle is writing two collections, one essay and one flash, inspired by the extraordinary animal life she’s encountered during her travels aboard her sailboat, Momo. ‘Whale Shark’ is from those new stories. Read more at michelleelvy.com and svmomo.blogspot.com.
Congratulations to all who made it through to our short list.
Read in Full
We’re delighted that renowned American flash fiction writer and teacher, Kathy Fish is judging our next award, which opens on November 1st.
Kathy teaches flash fiction for the Mile High MFA program at Regis University in Denver. She has published four collections of short fiction: a chapbook in the Rose Metal Press collective, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women (2008); Wild Life (Matter Press, 2011); Together We Can Bury It (The Lit Pub, 2012); and Rift, co-authored with Robert Vaughan (Unknown Press, 2015). Her story, “A Room with Many Small Beds” was chosen by Stuart Dybek for inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen’s Ferry Press).
Read in Full
Congratulations to all who made it through to our long list, and huge thanks to everyone who entered from all around the globe.
Read in Full