Micro Madness 2022
100-word stories for 22 days
Judges’ comments – from Rose Collins and Meg Pokrass
Because each story on the Micro Madness long list had something compelling and original, it was challenging to select just 3 winners, but eventually, after many readings, our top three emerged: ‘How to Prepare Supper for an Absent Lover’ (the winner) is a dramatic, poetic flash in which every word feels essential. The author makes brilliant use of metaphor and her gentle touch is masterful. ‘Picnic at Lady’s Bay, Kawau Island’ (second place) is a strikingly visual story involving domestic conflict that moves the reader intensely. And in the quirky and wonderful ‘Glassman’ (third place) every word matters. The writer brings us in tight and trusts the reader every step of the way.
Congratulations, everyone!
June 22 – FIRST PLACE
Julia Ruth Smith – Brindisi, Apulia, Italy
How to Prepare Supper for an Absent Lover
Take a butter knife and with a steady hand, stroke away the scales, from the tail up to the gills. Keep breathing. Hold firmly; it will be slippery like a newborn.
Split the belly. Don’t think about the dark blood in the sink that didn’t come for sixty-three days and now it’s everywhere and you’re sobbing.
Scrape out the insides carefully, any residue will leave the flesh bitter.
When he phones, you are grey-green shimmer; scored, scarred. He sounds oceans away; he may as well be, and when he asks, ‘What now?’ you squirm down the drain and away, gutted.
Julia Ruth Smith is a British writer, living by the sea in Italy. Her recent writing appears or is upcoming in Reflex Fiction, FlashFrog, NFFD UK Anthology, Miniskirt Magazine and Chaotic Merge, among others. Twitter @JuliaRuthSmith1.
June 21 – SECOND PLACE
Marjory Woodfield, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand
Picnic at Lady’s Bay, Kawau Island
(after the painting, ‘Allegorical Triumph of Sir George’ by Hamish Foote, 2001)
He drives a zebra-drawn carriage. Says picnic
is an ugly word, like snipsnap or chitchat.
She cuts a fashionable silhouette. Along the path
to Lady’s Bay, lily of the valley grows wild by her feet.
He has planted Chilean Wine Palms
beside Mansion House. Peacocks preen.
She spreads a white tablecloth. There are wax-eyes in the pōhutukawa.
He remembers spiders in the berries and cream.
Sand in the pâté.
Gannets dip and dive. She watches her daughter build a castle on the sand, carry water to the moat. She lights six candles on a cake, sings happy birthday dear Charlotte.
Marjory Woodfield has written for The BBC and stuff.co.nz, and her work has appeared in literary magazines (Orbis, The Lake, Flash Frontier…) and Best Small Fictions. She won the New Zealand 2018 Robert Burns Poetry Competition, and has placed in Hippocrates, Yeovil, Ver and John McGivering writing competitions.
June 20 – THIRD PLACE
Guy Biederman – Sausalito, California
Glassman
She hires him to garden, skinny dips in the pool while he prunes. Invites him in. Her kids are scattered worldwide. Husband died poolside. She cackles. Backstrokes to the edge. He follows. They go inside. Her friends visit, he washes their cars. Bartends. Pretends side eyes amuse him. Through streaky windows he sees Mt. Tam, where once he was a grower. Rubbing clean the indoor Ficus leaves, hands go chamois soft. Her window washer arrives with suitcase. Tosses truck key – says polish the hitch. She beckons glass-man upstairs, voice prehistoric like the heron who mistook the pool for a pond.
Guy Biederman was born in the Chihuahuan desert, raised on a stingray in Ventura, learned to write in a goatherder’s shack during a war in Guatemala and lives on a houseboat in Sausalito California, where he walks the planks daily.
June 19
Rob Walton – Whitley Bay, UK
Transportation
Jakub kept his motorbike and quite a lot of his kit car in four cycle lockers at the light railway station. Donna said it wasn’t right to have such things in the kitchen and she wouldn’t live in a 1970’s sitcom and he should know this. He was naturally hackneyed and borderline ridiculous, but felt rejuvenated when he moved everything to the northbound platform and all for free. He kept the four keys on a heart-shaped keyring. It wasn’t fair on the commuting cyclists, but it would keep his relationship going for a while longer.
Rob Walton is from Scunthorpe, and now lives in Whitley Bay, England. His poems, flash fictions and short stories for adults and children have appeared in various anthologies and magazines in several countries. Arachne Press (UK) published his debut poetry collection, This Poem Here, in March 2021. He has also written scripts, a pathway and columns for Scunthorpe United’s matchday magazine. He sometimes tweets @robwaltonwriter.
June 18
Annette Edwards-Hill, Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
My dog won’t shit in the rain
and we’re waiting for a gap in the weather. It is dark when we leave the house.
I drag the dog along on her lead thinking about Tom and how I could just knock on his door because we’re in the neighbourhood and last time I saw him I left my cup of coffee half drunk.
Finally, the dog crouches and strains on the wet grass until we are caught in the headlights of a car. I pull her away.
At home my dog’s eyes say I’m not done yet and I think neither am I. Neither am I.
Annette Edwards-Hill lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Her short stories and flashes have been published in New Zealand and overseas. She won second place in the Reflex Fiction Autumn 2021 competition.
June 17
Patience Mackarness – Brittany, France
Euplectella aspergillum: A love story
After the cameras leave, the Venus Flower Basket begins to grow.
Attenborough waxed breathless, describing how the sponge’s delicate latticework becomes a lifelong prison for monogamous pairs of shrimp. How in Japan, it’s given as a symbol of love.
Scientists speculate that this new exponential growth was triggered by submarine hydrothermals, or extreme concentrations of CO2 in the oceans. Believers call it conscious evolution, a response to humans despoiling the land. They say the creature has a plan.
Vast glimmering forests, unearthly white skyscrapers reach up from Pacific deeps, towards the light. They have yet to break surface.
Patience Mackarness is a British writer based in France. Her stories have been published by Flash Frontier, Potato Soup Journal, JMWW, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, Lunch Ticket and elsewhere. Her flash fiction and other work can be found at https://patiencemackarness.wordpress.com/
June 16
Michael Cocchiarale – Chester, Pennsylvania, US
Conjugate
Mother was failing French on the front porch swing. Hurried, hard, I spared just seconds to lecture: “Désirer—regular verb. Voler. Détester. Conjugation’s the same.”
“Merci,” she whispered, wincing at the time. There was laundry left, an experiment with Cassoulet.
That night in the dollar store lot, some jeune fille helped me off into her hands. Back home, trashed, I popped the can to find meat drunk in an ooze of fat.
Mother never finished the course. The degree. Today, I was told she’d died alone. Mourir, I recalled—one of those heartless irregulars.
I hardly knew where to begin.
Michael Cocchiarale is the author of the novel None of the Above (Unsolicited, 2019) and two short story collections–Here Is Ware (Fomite, 2018) and Still Time (Fomite, 2012). His creative work appears online as well, in journals such as Fictive Dream, The Disappointed Housewife, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, and South Florida Poetry Journal.
June 15
Dadon Rowell – Kirikiriroa Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand
Cold Open
She wasn’t sure if it was Claire calling. Between the ferns and kahikatea there were only rustles of bugs and green. The calling stopped. Should she go after it, leave the clearing?
In the folklore section of Redhook library, under the 300s, there were stories of voice imitators, malevolent spirits and once-human carnivores. They would toss words high into the trees – a loved one in pain, a lost hiker – then when someone came running to help, they would be snatched.
She imagined herself caught, split open, vivisection-like, or skewered – dying butterfly pinned to cork. She wasn’t sure it was Claire.
Dadon Rowell is a Kirikiriroa based poet & short fiction writer. Her work has featured in Mayhem, Food Court, Poetry NZ, Sweet Mammalian, Aotearotica and Starling. Most recently she co-won the NZYWF 24-hour Flash Fiction Competition. She dabbles in words and arty things on Instagram @dadon.rowell
June 14
Amy Barnes – Nashville, Tennessee
The Man Who Has His Picture Taken at Sears and Never Comes Back
When Jesus arrives, I offer him Final Net to style his shoulder length hair. No filters he says. I wouldn’t dare, I tell him but he should know better; it is a mall photography studio. I chose the blonde-haired, blue-eyed lens. Have you considered modelling? I ask, imagining him riding a horse on the beach or wearing a pirate costume on a romance novel cover. He shakes his head no and reminds me he’s here for work: a simple headshot for Bibles and stock photography. He buys only the basic package, promising to return in three days.
Amy Barnes has words at a variety of sites. Her full-length collection AMBROTYPES was published by word west in March, 2022. She lives in the southern United States. You can find her on Twitter at @amygcb.
June 13
Sue Barker – Waipu, Te Tai Tokerau/Northland, Aotearoa New Zealand
Lac Long Quan: Where shop after shop sell enamelled house numbers
A sudden cloudburst forces our choice.
“What number?”
“180.”
“We have 179, 181…”
“No 180?”
“I will send my grandson. He will get. Sit. You wait.”
He pours green tea. We all drink. On the wall is an A4 black-and-white photo; a street scene here in Hanoi, faded, curling in its plastic sleeve.
I stand to look closer: few people on the street, tanks and Jeeps on the road.
“1964.” He points his long curved finger-nail to a blurry figure standing outside a destroyed shopfront, head turned, looking at the tanks. “Me. 16.”
He turns to pour more tea.
Sue Barker lives in Waipū, rural Te Tai Tokelau/Northland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and shares stories with the Whangārei Library 3.30 Flash writers’ group. She writes all the short forms and seeks to capture small moving interactions between characters.
June 12
Sheree Shatsky – Florida, US
You Broke Your Mother’s Heart
My parents pass the potatoes and tell the story of the new dinner table. My mother’s dream table. Dreams dashed after I quit my job at the used furniture store and lost my employee discount. “No discount, no dream table!” my mother cried to my father. “What a deal I cut,” he boasts, “I ate that sales guy alive, fifty percent off retail.” He points his knife at me. “No thanks to you.” Our ice teas slant the way of the too short table leg. We clump like kittens drinking milk from the same tiny bowl.
Sheree Shatsky is excited her novella Summer 1969 shortlisted at the Bath Novella in Flash Award 2022 and is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction! Read more of her writing at shereeshatsky.com. Sheree tweets @talktomememe.
June 11
Melanie Dixon, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand
Waimate Cowboys
We rode out of town before sunrise. Three of us cowboys wending our way down the deserted Waimate High Street. Not a wallaby in sight. We took the rolling, bucolic Backline Road towards the high-country passes: McKenzie, Meyers and Hakataramea, suede-covered in the half-light distance.
Magpies dawn-gurgled from gum-tree perches as we rolled by on silent wheels. Dogs barked in empty farmyards. Bullocks brayed at my clanking coffee cup. The sun rose blood-orange above misty Canterbury fields. And a dusty road stretched ahead over the Hunter Hills.
Three of us cowboys. Riding out before dawn.
Nobody saw us go.
Melanie Dixon writes flash fiction, short stories, poetry and novels for young people. She is based in Christchurch, New Zealand, and when she’s not writing she’s usually planning her next outdoors adventure.
June 10
Jan Kaneen – Cambridgeshire Fens, UK
Things I saw and felt whilst balancing a tower of pebbles on the beach the day I finished my finals
1 Cerulean sky, thistledown clouds, Steve playing chicken like a child in the waves.
2 Contentment as I searched for colour-matched pebbles – speckled ambers, rusty corals, warm apricots flecked with cream.
3 The baby whale inside me spinning somersaults as I positioned the final plum of weathered pumice.
4 Infuriation as the cairn toppled.
5 Realisation that I should’ve chosen pebbles for their potential to stay put as much as for their gorgeousness.
6 A flash of fear – maybe I should’ve used similar criteria selecting my baby’s father.
7 Steve’s caramel skin and sea-salt hair.
8 Decidedly unscientific certainty.
Jan Kaneen lives in the Cambridgeshire Fens where she writes micros that win prizes in places like Bath Flash, NFFD UK, Write from the Heart & Retreat West. Her memoir-in-flash, The Naming of Bones, is available from Retreat West Books.
June 09
Lee Kimber – Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand
Stolen
The roads and dams have swallowed our baobabs. Water only comes from taps, and electric lights are our fires.
I buy blood-red shoes. I dance past my people at the bus stop. I dance to our camp. Mum watches my feet, says, ‘whatcha get those shoes for?’ Uncle points, laughs, spills his drink. Aunty watches his bottle.
The cliffs below the dam are empty, their water stolen to light up town.
I take off the shoes. Little sticks and red gravel scratch my feet again. I watch them spin in the air, but don’t watch them hit the water.
When Lee Kimber is not writing or working with other writers, she is with family, in her native garden, or travelling. She has two published children’s books, several short pieces in anthologies, and is now giving ‘novella-in-flash’ a go.
June 08
Frances Gapper – Black Country, UK
Answer to her Question
Two young seagulls follow their mother around the sports field, whistling with necks outstretched. She walks fast, trying to shake them, but they are big and determined in their nearly adult plumage. At last she flaps and takes off. Soaring high above the town she wonders, is it ever possible to stop being a mother?
The air ruffles her undercarriage, her wing feathers are aligned, she’s in the flight zone. Drifting over coastlines, thinking only of wind speed and direction. The tiny pulls of faraway stars. The heartbeat. She can sleep on the wing and maybe keep aloft forever.
Frances Gapper lives in the UK’s Black Country. Her micros ‘Plum Jam’ (FlashBack Fiction) and ‘She’s Gone’ (Wigleaf) appeared in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2021 and ‘For a Widow’ (Twin Pies) is included in Best Microfiction 2022.
June 07
Karen Walker – Ontario, Canada
Sybil’s Signals
Over dinner, Walter and Sybil talked about love, loss: his wife so suddenly, her husband years ago.
Sybil held up three fingers. Kissed them. ‘He didn’t come home one night.’
Walter tried to finger kiss. ‘What does this mean?’
‘Good riddance and good digestion,’ she said. ‘How’s your steak?’
Later, in the park, Sybil plunged down a kiddie slide. Knocked Walter flat, flashed her black lace panties.
What does this mean, he wondered.
The drive back to Sybil’s place – her fingers squeezing his knee – was slow. Red light after red light.
Walter was grateful for the warning.
Karen Walker writes very short in Ontario, Canada. Her work is in or forthcoming in FlashBack Fiction, Bandit Fiction, Scapegoat Review, Reflex Fiction, Bullshit Lit, Five Minute Lit, The Ekphrastic Review and others. She/her. @MeKawalker883
June 06
Desna Wallace, Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand
Uncle Ian
Uncle Ian was the spitting image of my father, so people said. So similar you could barely tell them apart. My father blamed Ian for many things; being somewhere he wasn’t. Ian’s fault. Doing something he shouldn’t. Ian’s fault. But Ian never existed. He was just some random doppelganger seen around town a number of times. It became a family joke – let’s blame Ian, the twin that wasn’t. So after my father died suddenly, unexpectedly, I searched crowds everywhere, wanting nothing more than to find Uncle Ian, just so I could see my father’s face, one more time.
Desna Wallace is a school librarian, writer and tutor of creative writing. She likes to potter with words in her spare time. Her Children’s novel Canterbury Quake was a Children’s Choice finalist in the Children’s and YA book awards a few years back.
June 05
Carrie Beckwith
One Wild Night
Wind whipped a branch on a horse’s rump, and he bolted. Thought he was a colt again, cleared the fence. Scared himself sillier when he hit the road, the clatter of his own hooves deafening.
Annie was up close to the windscreen, staring hard, wipers working overtime. ‘Be late for her own funeral’ some said. Took the bend a little too fast. Wasn’t expecting Hi-Ho-Silver.
The cops put a blanket over her, same for the horse. Like two late-to-the-day speed bumps.
The farmer’s wife took up her vigil sat betwixt the two. Country folk you see. It’s what you did.
Carrie Beckwith is a writer from Stratford-upon-Avon and Christchurch, NZ, where the Avon River runs. Returning to flash, she is working on a novella and collection. She’s published in print and online, including Flash Frontier, and was longlisted in the 2014 NFFD NZ competition.
June 04
Judy Darley
The Tempest Inside
The wind has trapped a leaf between scaffolding poles. Cary’s stillness, watching, draws Ruth’s attention, and they stand side by side, staring.
Ruth asks: ‘Sycamore?’
Cary nods. In the windowpane’s reflection, her smile is too tight for her face. She’s avoided mirrors since coming home from the hospital.
Ruth’s hand strokes Cary’s nape in a gesture that was once habitual.
Cary manages not to flinch away. As her head turns, their lips meet. It’s clumsy, with teeth bumping beneath the softness, not unlike their first kiss in an unlit garden where their breathing sounded a gale in her ears.
Judy Darley is the author of three short fiction collections: The Stairs are a Snowcapped Mountain (Reflex Press), Sky Light Rain (Valley Press) and Remember Me to the Bees (Tangent Books). Find Judy at http://www.skylightrain.com and https://twitter.com/JudyDarley.
June 03
Vivian Thonger – Kerikeri, Aotearoa New Zealand
Doubt kicks in on the world’s longest flight
The schematic map orients to Mecca, in case of praying. A cartoon plane traces a green trail.
Clean green, neatly mowing the upper atmosphere.
As if the joyous roar and shake of this twilit tube could obliterate the bottles and beads gyring far below.
As if we weren’t on the brink. The brink we built.
Spinning past me all night, Eliot’s words:
‘And meanwhile we have gone on living,
Living and partly living’
My inner eyelids animated by the flickering superhero movie on my neighbour’s screen, my overfull ears pick up a slight ticking.
Her fingers working the rosary beads.
Poet, writer and actor/performer, Vivian Thonger hones her skills with several Northland groups, including the Bay of Islands Writing Group and Kerikeri Theatre Company. An illustrated, co-written, chopped-up memoir with soundtrack is in the offing.
June 02
Finnian Burnett – Princeton, British Columbia, Canada
A Life Recorded
They exist in refracted light. They’re infants, toddlers, children, young adults. Their chubby baby thighs grow slender and wiry. They crawl, walk, break into a run.
The aperture captures unmoving children in swimming pools, heads thrown back, mouths open in silent shrieks for attention.
Here they are on new bikes, the first day of each school year, the prom, so many lost teeth. They’re caught in shadow and light, immortalized – and when their father can no longer remember their names or why they don’t visit, he can still remember that bike, that tooth, that dance, those children.
Finnian Burnett is a college English instructor who spends more time watching Star Trek and writing flash fiction than grading papers. They live in Princeton, British Columbia, Canada with their wife and Lord Gordo, the cat.
June 01
James Montgomery – Stafford, UK
A Grand Jeté is a Split in the Air
It’s in her breath-blood-bones but she knows only too well that plié also means to bend, dégagé, to disengage, brisé, to break.
The judges wait.
She breathes, drawing deep, then moves, and she’s a shadow to her body, head held high as hope, as she launches, leaps–
– and the air splits and she’s 4, watching angels air-dash, 6, a burst of blush, 9, 11, 13, the never-ending ripple-rupture of rehearsal-practice-rehearsal-practice, 16, centre stage, the rapturous peal of her heart ringing out to the swell of applause, 18, here, alive, now, as she shoots from the surge of the moment, forward.
James Montgomery’s stories appear in Gone Lawn, Maudlin House, FlashFlood Journal and elsewhere. He won the Best Micro Fiction Prize at the 2021 Retreat West Awards. Find him at jamesmontgomerywrites.com and on Twitter at @JDMontgomery_
The 2022 Micro Madness Long List (by title)
A Brief History of My Telephones
A Grand Jeté is a Split in the Air
A Life Recorded
Answer to her Question
Anthropomorphism
Bug Test
Bye Bye Baby
Cold Open
Conjugate
Dandelion Wishes
Doubt kicks in on the world’s longest flight
End of season
Euplectella aspergillum, a love story
Everyone knows Darcie’s going to die on her knees waiting for him to say it
Funland
Getaway
Glass-man
How to Prepare Supper for an Absent Lover
Human-Bird Bubble
Jamun
Lạc Long Quân; Where shop after shop sell enamelled house numbers
Laundry
My Dog Won’t Shit in the Rain
One wild night
Picnic at Lady’s Bay, Kawau Island
POV-UFO
Rescue
Rosewater
Stolen
Storm
Sybil’s Signals
The Conundrum of Too Many Kims
The countertop
The Drive to Experience Weightlessness
The Hunger
The Man Who Has His Picture Taken at Sears and Never Comes Back
The Offering
The Procrastinator
The Tempest Inside
The Temptation of Apples
The Wind and The Moon
Things I Saw and Felt Whilst Balancing a Tower of Pebbles on the Beach the Day I Finished my Finals
Tragi/Comic
Transportation
Uncle Ian
Uninvited
Waimate Cowboys
Who pushed Humpty the D?
Wild Horses
You Broke Your Mother’s Heart
Thank you to this year’s wonderful judges…
Rose Collins has a Masters in Creative Writing from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (2010). Her short stories and poems have been published in journals and anthologies, including Sport, Turbine/Kapohau, the Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019, Flash Frontier, Sweet Mammalian and 4th Floor.
She won the 2020 Micro Madness competition (no-theme category) and has been shortlisted for the Bare Fiction Prize (2016), the Bridport Prize (2020) and the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize (2020).
Her debut poetry manuscript is currently in the shortlist for the John O’Connor Prize for Best First Book of Poetry. Rose was the 2018 Writer in Residence at Hagley College and has taught creative writing to children and teenagers at the School for Young Writers.
She is a some-time litigation lawyer, a beekeeper and a mother of two and she lives in Te Whakaraupō/Lyttelton Harbour, New Zealand with her family.
Meg Pokrass is the author of eight collections including Spinning to Mars (winner of the Blue Light Book Award, 2021) and The Loss Detector (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020). Her work has been widely published internationally in literary journals and has been anthologized in three Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form.
She is the Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction and Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review. Meg’s most recent collection is a collaborative book of fabulist microfiction,The House of Grana Padano, co-written with noted America prose poet Jeff Friedman, (Pelekinesis, 2022).
She lives in Inverness Scotland, and teaches flash fiction both online and in person.
Find out more at megpokrass.com