Thanks to everyone who entered the November 30th online Flash Fiction Festival Day contest. Jude provided three picture prompts of optical illusions to choose from. Writers were asked to write stories in three paragraphs with the paragraphs linked using the figure/ground components of the pictures. One of the winning writers used the well-known young woman/old woman picture shown here and two used a picture of astronauts/moon (linked here, but not shown, because of copyright issues).
Congratulations to the winners, Cheryl Markosky, first prize and runners-up Laura Besley and Gill 0’Halloran. Their stories are published below.Thank you also to writer and NFFD Co-Director Diane Simmons, our resident on-line FFF judge, for selecting the winning stories and writing comments.
Diane said this about the entries:
“Jude provided three photographs of optical illusions: a dog/man in the woods; an old lady/young lady, and one with a skull/astronauts and moon/earth. She asked writers to choose one of the prompts and to write a triptych. It was interesting reading the variety of entries, with the astronaut/moon prompt by far the most popular. There were several stories vying for a place and I spent quite a while trying to decide on my final three.”
First Prize by Cheryl Markosky
Today she’s young again
…in the 70s flickering neon skirt her father complains is no bigger than a sash and fishnets the shade of smeared frog spawn. She downs underage Rum ‘n’ Cokes at The Greenhill. Pretty grown-up on a stool in the half-light masking cigarette butts ground into affordable housing-grade carpet. The guy she’s with a decade older and already balding. Her mother warns if she goes around with him their kids will have bad hair, but he drives a Chevy with leather seats and ‘Don’t stop ’til you get enough’ pumping out of the eight-track. A doctor lingers over the internal exam when she gets the pill on the quiet, a small price to pay for dodging snapshots of kids with receding hairlines.
Years from now when she’s obsolete and feeling like a squashed toad on the Trans Canada, she reminds herself of the good stuff, like the Kmart wraparound skirt she got in a sale that still fits and flows the same as her kid’s ringlets. Like her kid that came out from under the skirt, despite letting the doctor probe with his fingers so she could get hold of the pill that didn’t goddamn work. Her kid with hair so beautiful he appeared in a commercial with Kim Basinger for shampoo “brewed with real beer – but don’t drink it!” Hair so beautiful he couldn’t have been the old guy’s kid after all, she wishes.
Today before she gets old and the tornado takes her neighbour’s house, leaving a pile of sticks, she settles on middle-age. Unwavering world where she can cut her hair when she darn well feels like it, rather than keeping it long to please some man she’s forceped out of the pictures. Where she doesn’t worry when she has one too many Rum ‘n’ Cokes. Where she can swirl her fingers in her model son’s hair, frosted tips but still boyishly beautiful posing in the Eaton’s catalogue with a female model who’s no fucking Kim Basinger, but who gives a damn? Twisting like the toads will spin on her neighbour’s flooded driveway where nobody will park anymore. Like the fading notes of the old eight-track that stopped working long ago, but the song flows on for her and her son and one more pick-me-up in the storm and whatever comes next.
Diane’s comments
This flash has a strong, confident voice and from the first line I was totally engaged in the story. The author uses some effective descriptions and details and I particularly loved the description of the Kim Basinger shampoo commercial: ‘brewed with real beer – but don’t drink it!’
Bio: Cheryl Markosky
Born in Calgary, Canada, Cheryl Markosky now splits her time between London and Wiltshire in the UK, and the Caribbean. She writes flash and short stories alongside working as a journalist and theatre reviewer. Cheryl’s writing can be found in EllipsisZine, New Flash Fiction Review, Mslexia, Maudlin House, The Molotov Cocktail, Janus Literary, The Cabinet of Heed, The Drabble, Urban Tree Festival, WalkListenCreate (where she was writer-in-residence), and National Flash Fiction Day and Flash Fiction Festival anthologies. You can find out more about Cheryl on her website www.cherylmarkosky.com, and on X @cherylmarkosky and Facebook cheryl.markosky.
Runner-Up by Gill O’Halloran
Home
In a rundown café on space-hub B27Q, Travelle and Roamm reminisce about Earth, pre-apocalypse. They remember how she’d siren them with her mermaid hues, algae-green, ultramarine, drawing them back from the deepest cosmic oceans. They remember her twinkling cities, the march of dunes across her deserts, how she sang as she spun, a symphony only homesick astronauts could hear. They remember the old days, the overwhelm of jasmine and rose as they stepped onto terra firma again. And they recall Day Zero of the Great Relocation, how the spaceship tore them from the skirts of Mother Earth, hurtling through a fog of celestial death-dust like Orlok’s ghostly carriage. Without our mother, they say, we’re nothing, we’re orphans. Adrift.
On its unabating orbit of the sun, the skull passes the grey absence that once was Earth, remembers nothing. Doesn’t remember its parents’ apologies for begetting another witness to a dying planet, doesn’t remember being the last of the last eco-warriors, watching fellow protesters acquiesce one by one and succumb to the Great Re-Location. Doesn’t remember refusing the final call, watching the final craft jettison and disappear. If it could remember, it would picture its owner standing alone on the scorched and scarlet Earth, gazing up at the blue-bathe moon like a Luna hare. It would recall reciting poetry to the stars, downing a bottle of bittersweet Jucifer, tipsy-tiptoeing through the last glittering cinders at the ocean’s edge, cowering as the final thundercrack split the heavens, seeing darkness return to the face of the deep. But the skull remembers nothing, is nothing, a piece of space junk lost in galactic debris.
The moon shines into a vacuum where the Earth once lived. She’ll no longer pull the tides or dance a jewelled path over indigo oceans. The moon remembers life as metaphor: papoose canoe, scimitar, jai alai basket, even man-in-the-moon, before women reclaimed her as theirs. She thinks only after they’re gone, do you appreciate the things that used to madden you. Being made of cheese now strikes her as cute. Her surface still shines—Sun insists—but deep down, her soul is dark with fear. Freed from Earth’s gravity she feels the slowing of her spin as she sails towards hidden corners of the solar system, anchorless and alone. Without Earth, who is she? She prays for enlightenment, for a new and wiser home.
Diane’s Comments:
This flash packs a great deal into the word count and is a story that benefits from repeated readings. I’m always a fan of a flash with a good ending and the one in ‘Home’ lands perfectly.”
Bio:Gill O’Halloran lives in London where lidos (almost) compensate for the lack of sea. Her poetry book, This Seven-Year-Old Walks Into a Bar was in the 2009 Small-Press Poetry Awards’ top 20 individual collections. She has fiction in Bath Flash Fiction and Flash Festival Anthologies 2024, in Oxford Flash Fiction’s Transformations Anthology, and online in Trash Cat Lit, Underbelly Press and Thin Skin. She won first place in the Propelling Pencil Autumn 24 Flash Competition. She recently moved to @quickasaflash.bsky.social so please come and visit.
Runner-Up by Laura Besley
That meeting point where something is as close as it is far away on earth
on earth
Truth: from space, earth looks mostly the same – land masses don’t change shape, are always coloured green or desert-yellow; the water is a bottomless blue. The only difference between one picture and the next, is a twist of wind or a swirl of clouds. Along with school shoes, Mum buys me a bundle of National Geographics from the charity shop. Twenty for a pound. I spend hours scouring and cutting and plaster these pictures across my side of the bedroom. Mum’s side has a rack for our clothes, a box for t-shirts, another for underwear; and a single postcard of Joan Didion, arms crossed, smoking a cigarette. ‘Valentina! Dinner!’ Everyone else calls me Tina. We eat at a table by the window. Tables should always be by windows, Mum says. How else can you see the world?
in space
Truth: in year two, our topic at school is space. The teacher tells us that the first woman, the only woman, to fly a solo mission was called Valentina Tereshkova. Right there, in that classroom, I decide to become an astronaut, a woman of science, famous. Mum reads me books, we watch TV programmes, listen to podcasts. She sets her alarm for 3:17am or 4:22am so we can spot the Aurora Borealis and catch meteor showers. Another truth: when I’m eleven, my mum stumbles stepping off a pavement, bangs her head and is dead before the ambulance arrives. Social services track down a distant cousin who is a physics teacher, but I bury those dreams under the same soil that covers my mum’s body.
space on earth
Truth: two neurosurgeons split my skull, slice open my brain. Inside, they find a stream of images, flickering like a cine reel. Me feeding a pigeon. Me in those green dungarees I wore for three snowless winters. The surgeons will write a paper. My one moment of fame. Images of my mum: writing in bed; writing at that table; staring out at the world. Another truth: when I finally unpack her boxes, there are dozens of poem-filled notebooks. On each first page she’d written: for Valentina, my world. A final truth: the clearest image by far is of me and my mum – the two of us wearing all of our clothes, bedsheets tied over top, bouncing on the bed, like we can defy gravity, like we are life itself.
Diane’s comments:
An engaging picture of a relationship between a mother and daughter. I found the final section particularly affecting. I very much enjoyed the description of the mum buying National Geographics from the charity shop.
bio: Laura Besley (she/her) is the author of (Un)Natural Elements 100neHundred – shortlisted for the Sabateur Awards – and The Almost Mothers. She has a Masters in Creative Writing and is an editor with Flash Fiction Magazine. She also runs The NIFTY Book Club which meets monthly to discuss novellas-in-flash. Find out more & discover more of her writing on her website: laurabesley.com
