summer flash fiction contest
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This summer, we hosted our first summer flash fiction contest, guest judged by award-winning flash fiction writer Tom DeMarchi.
We were honored to read your submissions and usher in the next best small and mighty stories.
Take a moment to savor the works of our winners. As Meghan O’Toole writes, “press a hand into the damp earth” of these stories and feel their power.
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FIRST PLACE WINNER
“WE WHO ARE SPLENDID”
MEGHAN O’TOOLE
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The thing is, the house is hard to sell. The view of the grey-gone ocean doesn’t stark the cracked foundation or damage from when Basil couldn’t afford to fix the leak in the roof. The house leans west like it’s trying to peer over the edge of the cliff. It might go tumbling down someday. Not to mention the deaths.
Two people died here. A son shot his father in the living room. Later, the upstairs bedroom was turned into a hospice room for the son. That’s at least two deaths. There could be a third soon.
Basil was here for both of them. Ophelia, who lives in the small white room upstairs, too. The deaths passed. Basil and Ophelia fell through them, landed in routine: cook, garden, clean, work, sleep, wake, sleep. Plenty of cigarettes in between.
Ophelia works a post office job. Basil at a hardware store and a law office. People think they’re together. They’re not. They barely speak at all, only to say, “You bought the wrong kind of milk again” and carry on unpacking groceries.
They know the hard way that someone always leaves first. Basil has become suspicious of the way Ophelia goes down to the water and fits heavy stones in the pocket of her coat and sits and thinks for a while on the beach or wanders the clifftop path kicking stones down, watching them tumble and land anonymous on the pebble beach below. Basil listens to her fill the bath and sit unmoving in the water. She wants to drown again. He knows it. She has tried it a few times, and each time he pulls her from the water or she comes home sopping wet, and they cook potatoes, eggs, onion, and sausage for dinner and share black coffee and cigarettes like it’s breakfast.
But Basil has his own ideas, anyway, and he thinks the drowning distracts Ophelia from the train. It could be an accident. In the garden, he pauses his digging and listens to the sound of the horn with his eyes closed. A long time ago, someone told him it would be a quick, messy way to go. It would be alright to have someone clean up after him for once instead of the other way around.
Ophelia interrupts the horn like she’s been watching his face change. “I don’t think this place is good for us.” Her eyes glide back to the house, back to Basil. “We should move.” But the house is hard to sell. There’s too much to leave behind. She knows this, too. She crosses the garden and picks up the bulbs Basil was planting, presses a hand into the damp soil, leaves the bulb behind.
“We?” Basil asks. Perhaps in this one no one leaves first. Staying takes learning and time. Ophelia shrugs. Basil looks at the house, the windows lit from living. Yes, the house is hard to sell. It is the place where we still live.
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“Like all great stories, Meghan O'Toole's bittersweet, surreal ‘We Who Are Splendid’ feels complete--effectively finished--yet left me caring about what happens to Basil and Ophelia next. In other words, I'm left haunted by these characters in much the same way Basil and Ophelia are haunted by the ghosts in their house. Such deep emotional connection with the characters is difficult enough to establish in a longer short story, but O'Toole pulls it off in less than two flawless, detail-packed pages.” —Tom DeMarchi
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Meghan E. O'Toole is from Illinois. In 2018, she was awarded LitMag's Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction, and she graduated Summa Cum Laude from Elmhurst College in 2017 with a degree in English and received an MA in English from Western Illinois University in 2021.
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runner up
THESE KNOTTED RITUALS
AMY WALKER
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Some things in life are worse than death. Verily, verily, I say unto you, try being a 12-year old girl. One week you are skipping rocks in the sea of Galilee, the next you are promised to a nice Jewish, Muslim, or Christian boy. You know the one - grubby feet, dirty hands, hungry haunted adolescent eyes. Son of fisherman or physician, it makes no difference. This is about men and boys and what they are handed, not what a girl can actually choose. You beg your father, please abba please, don’t put a hook in my mouth.
His decision, my life. Then there is G--. I don’t know where to start. Those ten Commandments, that testament bound in absolutes and metaphors; to feel mercy, to know justice, so many questions. Humanity formed in His likeness was never made for easy answers.
I have dreams, I do. I blame my father, Jairus. Somewhere along the way I believed possibility was something offered that could never be retracted. I learned to read and write, I did, an anomaly for girls. Critical thinking, a disease that spreads. And people need to be protected from themselves. By people, I mean men. And by men, I mean, does an adolescent girl even really matter? There are unwritten rules, because men know that G-- stopped short with just ten. Thus, we come with a set of endless instructions, two thirds of which are hazardous warnings.
When I was little, there was light, and it was good. I would accompany my father to the synagogue, sometimes we sat where the elders would gather. He showed me a wider world, and he was not alone; others too, complicit. At their feet, I listened to the conversations. I learned about my neighbors: herders, pastoralists, merchants, kings and despots. The big men threw pocket-size religious texts at me, a distraction, the feel of rough camel leather and fragile scritta paper. But I was fascinated by their heady conversations and - let’s be real here – I was hungry for sensational gossip. Tales of money-changers and rampant corruption, whispers of ex-prostitutes, easy divorces, and sudden madness. I settled beneath the sweet cane smoke, inhaling myrrh and parchment, my fingers in a dance, tracing tenets to the chew and swallow, the latest communal crisis that needed redirecting with chapter and verse. The staccato and legato of male banter and debate, myth and mystery woven together.
But our world spins counter-clockwise, the world of girls. Last week the dowry negotiation, this week the union, sacred. So now I have fevered visions. Floating on a bed of my own salt, I see judges, doctors, scribes, disciples: all women. All the girls, all the lives, all the names shredded; evaporated into a sea of fathers, sons, husbands. A lineage predestined. All this wasted existence. Each bead, every click, worry sounds like prayer, these knotted rituals. And on the horizon line, my father runs after the one performing miracles. I want to know what about me demands this effort. My mother gnashes her teeth. What makes her heart hurt more, the imminent death of the child or the marriage.
The masses gather outside my window. A flute plays, discordant. Somewhere, there is laughter.
Tell me why should I want? To open my eyes. To rise up. I trace a future across the celestial expanse of a mind that could be limitless, the one their words and texts opened up. I am a burning bush, not the broken loaves and fishes.
Breath of frankincense, barometric pressure, a bridegroom appears at my bed: fear not. I do not know the man that takes my hand. Is it he who gives life or the one to whom I have been promised? Listen to the dreams. That I should behold.
Girl, you aren’t dead yet.
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“Praise be to Amy Walker! ‘These Knotted Rituals’ reads like scripture: timeless, wise, sacred, and shocking. Each sentence left me nodding and whispering, ‘Amen.’” —Tom DeMarchi
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Amy Walker is a multi-genre writer and international development practitioner. She has published in East by Northeast Literary Magazine, Northern New England Review, and Midway Journal. She was a finalist both for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers and for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards Competition. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and chocolate Labrador.
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MEET OUR GUEST JUDGE
we were honored to work with award-winning writer Tom DeMarchi to discover the best small and mighty flash fiction stories this summer
Tom DeMarchi teaches in the Department of Language & Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Florida. His work has appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, The Miami Herald, Quick Fiction, The Pinch, Gulfshore Life, The Southeast Review, and other publications. In 2019, he published Möbius Strips and Other Stories (Rain Chain Press). When not writing, teaching, sleeping, or cataloguing his music collection, you'll find Tom reading biographies of jazz musicians and dead presidents, watching his son play soccer, or meeting with colleagues to discuss the Sanibel Island Writers Conference, which he directs. Because of his haircut and monochromatic fashion sense, he is often mistaken for a police officer.
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