We’re delighted to announce the winners of the Great Festival Flash Off Day which took place on October 26th. For the ‘Signature’ challenge, Jude set the prompt and asked people to consider the painting shown here to spark off ideas and also to recall bad or good haircuts they might have had. In addition, we looked at some great story examples. Thank you to Writer and Co-Director of National Flash Fiction Day, UK, Diane Simmons, who has judged many of the festival competitions. She says: “Thank you to everyone who sent in haircut stories. I really enjoyed reading them and had a good chuckle when I took some printed out stories to the hairdressers to read while my hair was being dyed. It took me a few minutes to realise that the hairdressers was a very appropriate judging place! It was an unusual theme which generated a wide variety of stories, with several stories vying for a prize.” Diane’s also made specific comments on the winners below.
Winner by Noemi Sheiring-Olah
Hair Power
When I was seven, I chewed the ends of my ponytail during class. When teachers called me to answer questions, I munched on my hair, crisp like cornflakes between my teeth, and tasted the answer. Math was sour and spikey like a cactus. Science fizzed and stung like ginger. I bit down my hair and answered everything, trusting its lengthy wisdom.
Mom was a hairdresser, but she couldn’t afford to rent a salon, so women kept coming to our small flat. Every day, when I got home from school, I stepped through a powdery mist of hairspray and kissed Mom on the cheek. She smelled like a wet coconut. On our linoleum, waves of colourful locks: some dyed, some grey, some oily, some dry, all mangled together like a strong, spring current.
The principal harassed Mom with notes about my chewing, but Mom told him if he didn’t want teeth rings and saliva on the school’s desks, he’d leave me and my hair well alone thankyouverymuch.
I knew the women by the taste of their hair lingering in the air of our flat: salty and soft, like peanut butter, sweet and sharp, like cracked candy, cool and fragile, like a glass of iced water. But every woman shared something that was the same, even the women who carried the heaviest steel in their chests: a low, deep hum, a buzz, like sizzling electricity trapped under their skin.
Mom didn’t know this, but every night, when she fell asleep, I’d sneak next to her in her warm bed and slowly taste a lock of silky dark hair behind her ear, checking the spark of her hum with my tongue: tingling and fiery like lightning.
Diane’s Comments
This flash is full of wonderful imagery and I just love the ending. I also particularly enjoyed the ‘thankyouverymuch’ in the mum’s response to the teacher – I could hear her saying it so clearly
Bio: Noémi Sheiring-Olah grew up in a small flat at the edge of a Hungarian town. She’s now a nomad in a small world. Her writing has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and The Pushcart Prize, and appeared/is forthcoming in Passages North, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Literary, Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, The Molotov Cocktail, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Fiction, Janus Literary, Sledgehammer Lit, Moonflake Press, NFFD’s FlashFlood, The Write-In. She’s a fan of cats and underdogs. Writers’ HQ member. Autistic. Tweets and Bluesky: @itssonoemi
Runner Up By Gigi Vernon
Let Them Wear Cake
“My hair is ruinous.” Marie Antoinette tugged at her lifeless tresses, defeated. “Can you help?”
The styling was decidedly unroyal –simple and forgettable. It should be much more—she was the queen. And he, Monsieur Léonard, the new royal hairdresser, was the man for the task. He set to work, freshly sharpened shears snipping off split ends burned by his predecessor’s murderous curling tongs.
He crafted an amusing three-foot high pouf featuring a parrot in a cage who incessantly screeched “Off with their heads” in English. This was France. No one understood. But her majesty recognized he was a magician with hair.
Coiffure au jardiniere
He turned to more serious subjects. The queen should embody the nation’s abundance. On towering curls, he fashioned a garden with carrots, artichokes, flowers, a bubbling stream, and a miniature windmill. It was a triumph and widely imitated.
“Might we promote the inoculation of his majesty Louis XVI against the pox?” the queen asked timidly. “Maybe with something less extravagant?”
Nonsense! A queen should never be moderate. But she could and should be symbolic.
His creation to mark the occasion–a rising sun and a serpent in gold leaf entwined around a bejeweled staff–was magnifique.
A naval victory over the English was celebrated with an enormous replica frigate precariously balanced on her head. Instead of admiration, the hairstyle was mercilessly mocked for excess in the libelles. Her majesty burst into unbecoming tears. Perhaps that was due to her condition. Not long after, she was successfully brought to bed of another son, Louis Charles.
When the Bastille was stormed, he did not suggest capturing it in a coiffure, nor the flight from Versailles. By then, Monsieur Léonard was safely ensconced at the St. Petersburg court with Tsarina Catherine II who appreciated a talented hairstylist.
The apprehension and imprisonment of the royal family by the sans-culottes caused Marie Antoinette’s pompadour to turn stark white. For the first time, she was doing her own hair.
Coiffure décapité
Her newfound autonomy was fleeting, alas, though she was permitted to cut her locks herself with a pair of blunt scissors before she was introduced to Madame la Guillotine.
“Death to the queen!” the mob bayed. The executioner, Monsieur Sanson, obliged, raising her severed head by riotous hair matted with blood. It was a style truly unsurpassed.
Diane’s Comments
This was a highly original piece of surreal historical flash that I enjoyed enormously. It made me chuckle several times and left a smile on my face.
Bio
Originally from the Washington, D.C. area, Gigi Vernon now lives in the lovely Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. She has been known to swim across Cayuga Lake. She’s a historian and librarian who writes historical thriller and mystery fiction in the company of a needy conure (small parrot) known as Her Feathered Majesty. She’s never met a historical time period she doesn’t love.
Her short fiction and flash fiction have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and elsewhere. Her “Show Stopper,” which appeared in Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: ‘Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War’, was a 2015 International Thriller Writers finalist for best short story. She has an MA in Crime Fiction Writing from the University of East Anglia and a PhD in history. www.gigivernon.com
Runner Up By Debra A Daniel
The Hair of My Sister Swings
Cheerful. Sure of itself. Mine is sad-dirt brown and so and thick it wouldn’t move in a hurricane.
We both wear it long, hanging below our shoulders. Hers rests on her back like feathers, ruffling in the wind and taking flight when she flings herself into the air during her cheerleading leaps.
Mine shoves a heavy against me. A weight of hair threatening to sink me.
My sister, knowing my misery, comforts me with her special shampoos and conditioners.
“All the movie stars are doing that new bob,” she says. “It would bring out your eyes,” she says. “You should try it.”
“I can’t afford an expensive salon?” I say.
“I can do it for you. It’s a straight cut around the bottom and a fringe in the front.”
We cover the bathroom floor with newspapers. She grabs the scissors. I sit in front of the mirror.
“I’ll start in the back and then we’ll do the sides. You’ll be spectacular.”
She makes the first cut. The chop of the scissors sounds like she is cutting down a tree.
“Your hair really is thick.” She cuts again. “Hmm,” she says.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
“Nothing. I’ll just even it up a bit.” My sister cuts and slices. With every snip I flinch.
“When you jump, my hand jerks,” she says.
I become a statue. She moves to the side. “In the magazines the bob turns under ever so neatly? Your hair’s a little more stubborn.”
She cuts and cuts. Right side. Left side. Right. She’s concentrating, truly trying to do a good job. She sighs, scrinches her face, even groans. In the mirror. I watch my hair disappear.
“I thought it was going to rest on my shoulders,” I say, “but it’s shorter.”
She sideways smiles, “Let’s do your bangs.” She brushes my hair down into my face. I close my eyes. She eliminates layer after layer.
“We’re done,” she says. Her voice catches. “I’m really sorry.” I open my eyes. She cries. My hair pokes and juts like a terrified hedgehog.
But because my sister is so distraught, I hold my own tears
“Please don’t hate me.”
I tell her I could never hate her. She hands me the scissors. “Cut my hair,” she says. “Short and spiky.”
But I don’t cut her hair. Instead I hand her the scissors. “Even it up,” I say.
We start again.
Diane’s comments:
A confident, engaging flash that drew me in immediately. I knew I was in safe hands from the first line and I loved the way the story did not go the way I expected it to.
Debra A Daniel has published two novellas-in-flash, A Family of Great Falls and The Roster (AdHoc Fiction), Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher (novel), and two poetry chapbooks, The Downward Turn of August and As Is. She’s a Pushcart and Best Short Fictions nominee. She won The Los Angeles Review short fiction prize, received the SC Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, and awards from the Poetry Society of SC. Work has been longlisted and shortlisted in many contests and has appeared in: Snow Crow, Legerdemain, LA Review, Smokelong, Kakalak, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, and others.
