Lorraine Collins attended the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol every year since 2023 and was one of the first to book for this year’s festival in July. Last week, I heard from Jodie Collins, Lorraine’s daughter the incredibly sad news that Lorraine and her mother had been killed on March 25th 2026, from injuries sustained in a car accident. We offer deep condolences to the family for their tragic double loss. We will miss Lorraine very much at the festival. She had such a warm and lively presence and an infectious enthusiasm.

Lorraine also came to many of the online Festival days I organised and on one of the most recent days she told me with much excitement that Anne Anthony whom she had made friends with, was again attending. Lorraine was a very welcoming and friendly person. As Anne describes below, she was immediately made to feel at home when she came to Trinity College for the festival in 2024. Another writer, JP Relph, who was a newcomer last year, also wrote, on hearing the sad news, that Lorraine had made her feel very welcome too. Many others remember conversations with her in workshops, in the bookshop, outside in the grounds where Lorraine was camping and in the bar. I shall treasure the picture here someone took of me and Lorraine together to send to Anne, who couldn’t come last year. We were having fun and dancing in the bar at the karaoke entertainment at the time.

I was privileged that Lorraine came to ‘Precious Jewels’, the writing workshop I ran at last year’s festival and her story prompted by that workshop is in the 2025 Flash Fiction Festival Anthology which will be published soon. The poignant story below, which Anne Anthony gave writerly feedback on, will also be published in print in the 2026 Flash Fiction Festival anthology. I am honoured to be able to share it in her memory and hope both stories in print will offer some solace to the family.

Anne Anthony writes this about Lorraine:

“I first met Lorraine Collins when we swapped flash fiction stories to review and critique for an anthology. I mentioned during that exchange that I planned to attend the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol for the first time and she sent me piles of travel information about London, Bristol, and the festival itself. She told me she’d make sure to track me down and introduce herself. I remember how she took me under her wing during that weekend, introducing me to one writer after another as if she were my personal guide to this unknown writing community and made me feel instantly accepted and she did all this with that wide, welcoming smile of hers. We became, as Lorraine called us, ‘pen pals’ staying in touch, cheering each other along, and I suspect, I was not the only recipient of her generous heart and boundless energy.”

She will be missed by our writing community. Her bright light has been put out too soon. One of the last pieces we’d swapped was Lorraine’s flash, ‘How Could We Not?’ which I’m sharing with the permission of her family. It’d been inspired by the Henry Martin Glasser painting, ‘Backyard Pathway’, reproduced below.

How Could We Not?

by Lorraine Collins

Yesterday, I found the painting, reminding us of our honeymoon, where the snowy hills were smooth and bright, and how at first we couldn’t find the lodge, how lying in the afterglow of our first time, so dazzled with ourselves, and so unexpectedly ravenous, we dressed to find somewhere to eat, and discovered the diner run by that old European couple who served a homemade stew—we expected burgers and fries—and we never worked out their homeland, I thought Hungary but you thought Poland we didn’t ask, believing it rude somehow and we were timid then and unknowing, how they were so loving towards each other and I said do we think that’ll be us one day, when we’ve been together forever and you said how could we not? I studied the artist’s other paintings too, withholding judgment and taking my time, keeping an open mind. One image lingered: a solitary man shuffling up a snowy street, caught between light and shade, eyes focused only on what lies ahead, and struggling. But maybe I’m projecting, overthinking it. You’d tease me about that in our other life. I am trying to understand what you are going through now, the bewilderment, when your thoughts aren’t your own, when they suffocate you in a claggy fog of confusion. One day, when you return to yourself, we’ll go there again, where we honeymooned, the snowy lodge in New England. The light is so beautiful there, the sea so unchanging, and our hearts will lift. Oh, I pray you’ll recover—you’d be surprised and laugh at my newfound faith. Your therapist holds hope for your mind, your doctor holds hope for your brain, and I hold hope for your soul. We’re a team, the perfect trinity holding hope for you. How could we not?

Just in time for spring, here are the winners of the mini-contest from the online day on 21st Feb. The prompt was to write a story involving colour, a colour you love, a colour you hate, colourful language. Colour, of all kinds. Thank you for those who entered this time, and giving our resident judge, Diane Simmons
a very enjoyable reading experience. For this round, Diane chose Beth Sherman (who won a runner-up prize in the January contest ) as first prize with her story, ‘Nocturne in Green’. Runners up are Rosaleen Lynch with ‘Amber Days’ and Emma Williams with “Seeing Orange’.
Congratulations to all. The writers win books, BFFA competition entries and publication in our next Flash Fiction Festival Anthology and their stories are reproduced below.

First Prize: Beth Sherman

Nocturne in Green

The day you fall in love with green you’re sitting in the library, watching snow – dingy, soot-flecked, piss-stained, flecked with dirt. You stare until you unzip the ground and see emerald grass with notes of sweet pea. Blade pressed to blade, an Impressionist painting.

You tell your Professor you want to switch your dissertation to examining green’s mysteries and history. What about the Brontes, he asks. And you picture the moors. Yorkshire. Dartmoor. The names taste deliciously green on your tongue.

You invest in pickles, briny and sour, in olives with pimento hats, in chartreuse pears whose skin rips when you bite. You admire crocodiles, their eyes jade marbles, their jaws blush pink against muddy green throats. You dye your hair neon.

Green, you whisper, elongating the vowel so it sounds like a prayer. Your boyfriend buys bright green underwear with Lucky Charm on the back. He presents green carnations, like you’re on a blind date. He’s too pale. Too active. His boy-ness repulses you.

You buy a parrot, a lizard, a frog, studying each feather and scale, the way light greens in their presence. Fern green. Spinach green. Lantern green. Dragon green. Absinthe green. Racing green. Billiard table green.

Your boyfriend has turned you-know-what with envy, his cheeks the color of Granny Smith apples. He issues an ultimatum: Green or Me, and you wonder how he got his PhD.

When the snow melts, you roll on the grass naked at night. When your boyfriend leaves, you write an ode to green. Then a nocturne. Then a ghazal.

You make lime Jell-o, spooning it into your mouth so fast it makes you giddy.

You wrap your arms around the tallest tree in the park, gaze up at the needles, piney and true. Let’s see some progress, your Professor demands.

Green is endangered. Parched grass. Burnt forests. Blue-green ocean turned graveyard. I really expected more originality, your Professor says.

You know the diss will never get written. The boyfriend will never return. The obsession will leave you – this longing to pay attention.

But not now. Not yet.

You’re not lonely.

You have fireworks and frogs, avocados and ferns. Fresh basil. Harlequins and artichokes. Turtles and seaweed. Ferns and dinosaurs. For as long as this lasts, you have a sense of discovery.

You leave your apartment, smell new mown grass, a wildflower wind.

The stoplight at the corner turns green.

Go.

Diane’s comments
I galloped my way through reading this flash, smiling as I went. It has some wonderful descriptions and humour. I particularly loved the image of the boyfriend’s cheeks being the colour of Granny Smith apples – I could see him so vividly. And the ending is perfect.

Bio: Beth Sherman has had more than 200 stories published in literary journals, including Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres and SmokeLong Quarterly, where she’s a Submissions Editor. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 and Best Small Fictions 2025. She’s also a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. The author of five mystery novels, she can be reached on social media @bsherm36.

Runner-Up: Rosaleen Lynch

Amber Days

Everything’s yellow. Spanish sunshine yellow. Memory yellow. The dust in the air, on the road, coating my sneakers. It’s got that 70s movie vibe, though it’s the 80s, like a Polaroid that’s been overexposed. Even the payphone, in the bar I woke up in earlier, was yellow, like the bile I spat out, before leaving to thumb my way along the coast. The hangover mist, of car conversations and tapedeck music was yellow. The blanket in the sleeping quarters of the HGV was a deep yellow, like the road line I watched (as I did what I threatened to do, and flung the door open, to throw out my backpack, before he’d pull over and let me out), like the amber indicator of the car that stopped to see if I was ok, that had a bright yellow cut-out tree dangling from the rear-view mirror, a faint lemon scent reaching the back seat as we pulled away, and the lorry turned off the motorway.

The dry grass, on the verge where I’m sitting, is yellow and so’s everything I see, from the washed-out army-surplus backpack at my feet, to my faded denim knees, to my T-shirt saying Save Something, that was once-upon-a-time-ago white. And it’s not just my shades, and it’s not just the sun, and its not just because I’ve not had enough water and can’t remember the last time I ate or showered or peeed. I wonder if my urine’s yellow too?

A motorbike stops, and this guy’s shadow is a blessed relief, like TV sitcom music, as my reflection watches him smile, through helmet-visor-yellow. I lift my shades, to see a 1970 Suzuki T250, egg-yolk-yellow, like the one under tarpaulin in our backyard at home—Papa’s project since I can’t remember when. The guy asks where I’m going. To town, to meet my father, I say, I don’t say he’s scouting retirement options, now he’s not got Mama to keep him at home—my Spanish isn’t that good. I tell him, we’d arranged to meet at midday, at the church. He asks, which one. That’s when I realise, coming from a one-church-town doesn’t prepare you for everything. He asks if I want the old or new one. I wonder which Papa’d choose. I put my shades back on, and ask him to take me to the church nearest where he’s going, and I’ll just try my luck.

Diane’s Comments
This flash uses the colour yellow so well and I was right there, on the trip, totally engaged from the beginning. I very much enjoyed the carefree ending: ’l’ll just try my luck’ which was an effective contrast to some of the earlier intensity.

bio: Rosaleen Lynch is an Irish youth and community worker and writer in the East End of London with words in a number of journals, including New Flash Fiction Review, HAD, Fractured Lit, Craft, SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, EllipsisZine, Mslexia, Litro and Fish, and has been shortlisted by Bath Short Story Award, Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bridport Prize, is a winner of the HISSAC Flash Fiction Competition and the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize.

Runner-up: Emma Williams

Seeing orange

Orange, orange, bloody orange everywhere. Flashing its badge with its stop-and-search authority. Those brash motorway cones cordoning miles of single lane traffic for no apparent reason. The flapping of self-important police tape. That annoyingly equivocal middle traffic light. The brooding life jackets stowed under every seat; a pointless accessory for the plummet from 35,000 feet.

Pathological hatred might seem excessive for something as apparently benign as a colour yet that is what I harbour. A fearful loathing that sears with phobic intensity.

Not much that’s good in the world is orange; orangutans maybe, but even they’ve been known to eat smaller primates. To tear them apart. Bastards. Then there are actual oranges, the worst of all fruit with their insipid spongy pith, tooth-cracking pips, unpredictable spray of wasp-summoning stickiness. And flipping carrots! Ruiners of cake, salad booby-trappers, wartime blinders of night-mission pilots.

Pumpkins. Marigolds. Kumquats.

A dayglo show off with its needy look-at-me-ness. An assault to the eye. It’s why I don’t fly EasyJet. It’s why I hate the 45th president, the 47th even more. It’s why I don’t have kids: party balloons, cheery summer dresses, space hoppers. The Muppet Show. Children themselves, their fingers and mouths stained by cheesy Wotsits.

Don’t be fooled by its juvenile jollity; orange is an ambush predator.

It was a wondrous day, I was five, nearly six. Christmas morning with the outside trees all sparkly, the indoor tree twinkling red and gold. I was wearing my new blue slippers with the white bunnies on the top. I couldn’t stop looking down at them, wiggling my toes to get them to hop. Boing boing boing. Blocking out the shouting.

It was too slippery to play outside and it wasn’t nice inside with Mum and Dad throwing bad words and crockery. Marmalade fluffed his tail and shot under the sofa. Rusty slunk into his basket and curled up small. I stood very still. Dad didn’t pack any of his stuff he just zipped up his cagoule with one tug, pulled the hood tight.

With my breath fogging the pane, I watched him walk down the path, on through the rows of glittery trees. I knocked on the window. He didn’t look back to see me waving. Not once did he look back to see me waving. Just a blaze of orange in the whiteness.

Diane’s Comments
This was an engaging flash with an ending that satisfyingly reveals why the narrator hates the colour orange so much. There are some fabulous descriptions and I really enjoyed the image of the children with their fingers and mouths stained by cheesy Wotsits.

Bio:Emma Williams’ work has featured in the LISP Anthology, The Most Normal Town in England Anthology, Manx Reflections and The Amphibian Literary and Arts Journal. Emma was the winner of the Segora International short story Prize and the Wenlock Olympian short story Prize and has been listed by the Cambridge Prize, Write by the Sea, ChipLitFest, Alpine Fellowship, and the Bedford Prize. She has published two novels: The Tortoise (2021) and Nothing but the Truth (2023). Her new novel Edgar is due to be published next month. She lives in Shropshire, UK. Instagram: tortoise_books

The writing challenge for the January 10th online festival day mini contest was to write a story in three sections inspired by three snowy paintings by Henry Martin Glasser 1909-1981. The paintings are in copyright so here’s a link to one of them, ‘Highway Diner’. . The other paintings by Glasser were ‘Flat to Let’ and ‘New England Evening’.

I introduced the prompt, asking the writers to write in ‘slow prose’, perhaps the opposite of the familiar ‘breathless paragraph’ type of flash fiction. Thank you to everyone who entered. There were many interesting and inventive stories, which our regular judge, writer and co-director of National Flash Fiction Day, UK, Diane Simmons selected from. I have pictured The Monkey Puzzle tree at Trinity College, Bristol the in-person Flash fiction venue, as trees, although sometimes fast-growing, are often slow. I think this tree has been growing in the grounds for over 100 years.

All three brilliant stories, by first prize winner, Mack Mckenna and the two runners-up, Beth Sherman and Emma Phillips are copied below and Diane’s comments are under each piece. The winners receive books published by Ad Hoc Fiction, free entries to Bath Flash Fiction Award and publication in the 2026 festival anthology as well as here. Read in Full

For the November 2025 Great Festival Flash Off mini contest, Jude gave two choices as writing prompts. One, a CNF about learning (or never learning) to swim, and another prompt sparked by surfers on an Australian beach. Most entrants chose the learning to swim story. The picture shows Jude’s mother teaching her to swim in the 1950s (favourite photograph). There were many inventive stories and Diane Simmons our judge (who reads anonymously) said she enjoyed reading them all very much First prize this time goes to Ingrid Jendzrejewski for her cnf piece, ‘Swim’, and runners up are Erin Bondo with her CNF piece ‘Fish Girl Summer’ and Alexis Somerville with ‘Adult Beginner’. Big congratulations to all and thank you to everyone who entered this time.
The stories are reproduced below together with Diane’s comments. All three winners will also be published in the 2026 Flashfiction Festival Anthology and receive prizes of books and free entries to BFFA.

First Prize

Swim

by Ingrid Jendzrejewski

In the lake on my own with half of Shagbark Girl Scout Troop 314 cheering from the edges — it’s a challenge, a challenge, to swim as far as we can without taking a breath and even though I’m in a grubby hand-me-down suit I know I’m good at this, good at this, so good I’m streaming through the water and I’m sure beyond sure I can swim farther than the girl in the striped bikini, the one with the nice hair and nail polish even at age 10 and the pierced ears and the perfect teeth and so I’m going for it, really pulling the water, swimming like a bullet from a shotgun and I keep holding my breath and I keep going going going even though I know I’m going under under under the decking and even though my lungs are starting to beg for air, there’s no turning back now because that girl with the bikini and the hair and the nail polish she has so much, so so much more that I’ll ever have and people like her and talk to her and she knows how to talk to people and how to make everyone be friends with her even though she also sits above everybody and lets everybody know it without saying a word and she’s so perfect perfect perfect almost perfect but there’s this one thing I can do better — this one thing — I can hold my breath until my lungs hurt and I can harden my heart when they plead and burn I can swim swim swim swim swim until I’m well beyond the buoys, well beyond the places girls like me are meant to be and above my head there’s the Styrofoam underneaths of decking slick with algae and this feeling that even when I get to the other side of the dock and finally crest for air there will always always always be something over my head, keeping me underwater forever forever forever.

Bio. Ingrid Jendzrejewski is co-director of National Flash Fiction Day UK, an editor, a writer and a writing tutor. She has published over 100 shortform pieces and has won multiple flash fiction competitions, including the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize for Flash Fiction. Her short collection Things I Dream About When I’m Not Sleeping was a runner up for BFFA’s first Novella-in-Flash competition. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Vestal Review’s VERA Award, and multiple times for Best Small Fictions.

Diane Comments:Swim
This is such a clever use of the breathless paragraph. Like the girl in the story, I too held my breath, feeling such tension as the girl swam and swam ‘well beyond the buoys, well beyond the places girls like me are meant to be…’. I’m a fan of a strong ending and this lands perfectly.

Runner-up

Fish Girl Summer

by Erin Bondo

She wakes up gasping for water, the rough slit of gills puckering the skin below her ears, like every morning since they arrived. Fish Girl is down the cottage steps and gone before she can be caught, lets the screen door slam on her mother’s eat something first, please! A perch-yellow suit snatched from the line, a wrangle of vestigial limbs, she sprints the still-cool sand to the lip of the lake, hurls her changing body at its sky-mirrored surface, disappears beneath. Loping ripples are the only trace of her nightly return to dry land.

The cold water welcomes her, runs soothing fingers across sun-scaled skin, teases free the knots of another splintered night’s sleep, tutting along as Fish Girl bemoans her early bedtime, her brother’s bogarting the only fan in the heat-steeped bedroom. The lake doesn’t care Fish Girl is the youngest, never says maybe next year or because life’s not fair or why don’t you just keep Gramma company? Here she is eely fast, the knowledge knitted into fascia and bone, a reminder swimming, like breathing, comes from before – before fear, before her memory reel stutters to a start with the smell of damp soil and a freshly opened pack of Trident spearmint stick gum. Before the word lonely.

Fish Girl dives deeper, her belly dredging the wrinkled lakebed on the hunt for lost golf balls and submerged landmarks: Turtle Rock, perfect for diving, its wide-flat shell a family heirloom, and Beetle Rock, the size of a sunken Volkswagen. She thinks maybe she will stay down here, until she is missed, until panicked strains of Fish Girl? Fish Girl! carry from the beach. But the wind stays silent through the morning and into the idle heat of the afternoon, when her stomach begins to squeeze and her gills begin to fade and her body aches for the air and the sky.

She pads back, slowly, swinging open the screen door to wash your feet first, please! and can you help your cousin set the table? and look at you! you’ll turn into a fish if you’re not careful! Fish Girl runs her fingers along the smooth skin of her neck, wishing it were true.

Bio: Erin Bondo grew up in rural Ontario, Canada on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabek and now lives in Scotland. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and placed or listed in a number of competitions, including the Bridport Prize and Bath Flash Fiction Award. She has work published or forthcoming with Kelp Journal’s The Wave, BFFA, Flash Fiction Festival, and others. Find her on Bluesky @erinbondo.com

Diane’s Comments
Fish Girl Summer
I loved the rhythm of this piece and the dialogue worked so well I could hear and see the mother so clearly, especially with the ridiculous ‘you’ll turn into a fish if you’re not careful’. An engaging, original flash.

Runner-up

Adult Beginner

by Alexis Somerville

I was never a swimmer but as a kid I’d go with my siblings to those stark municipal pools with the echoey voices; I’d grasp my float and pretend to swim, neon orange bands hugging my skinny arms, and the best time was always back in our jumpers in the blue-grey lounge with the formica tables and our cheese sandwiches and crisps, hair smelling of chlorine. I was never a swimmer but at school we were supposed to learn and our class would visit alien schools to use their baths and step into rectangles of verruca-proof liquid and flap around in damp swimming cossies slapping against goose-pimpled bum cheeks, and some kids became mermaids while I skulked in the shallow end, clinging hard to the lip of the pool. I was never a swimmer but at 13 I joined an adult beginner class at the local leisure centre where the grown-ups trembled at the edges, stricken with decades of putting this off, and their limbs would not obey them and I saw that maybe I could just kick my legs a little and expand the world. I was never a swimmer but a width became a length and I got a certificate to say I might be some kind of embryonic fish and I wouldn’t perish instantly on contact with water. I was never a swimmer but at 19 I swam across a turquoise lake surrounded by pines and I still don’t know how. I was never a swimmer and I still won’t swim in the sea but now I live a short motorbike ride from the coast and my partner is a swimmer so I watch from the shore as he plays in the waves like a seal. I was never a swimmer but sometimes I wade out into the North Atlantic and feel the icy line burning across my thighs and breathe the salt air and catch the lather of waves in my hands. I was never a swimmer so I don’t stay long in the ocean; I paddle back through the shallows for a picnic on the beach – not only cheese and bread and crisps but also grapes and olives and pastries. I was never a swimmer so after lunch I lounge on the warm sand and read, or draw, or write.

Bio: Alexis Somerville is based in Portugal, where she teaches undergraduates. She is originally from York, UK and studied creative writing at the University of Leeds. Her short fiction has been published in several literary journals and highly commended in the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award. Her poetry translations have appeared in the Portuguese/English anthology Dez Ar Mar. Cipher Press have published her illustration work.

Diane’s comments Adult Beginner
The repetition of ‘I was never a swimmer’ works well in the flash and the use of so many specific details helped engage me as a reader. The ‘verruca-proof’ liquid totally resonated with me as I remembered my own grim swimming lesson experiences.

We’re very pleased to announce our much delayed Flash Fiction Festival Anthology Vol seven has now been posted out to contributors. There are 88 stories within the anthology from participants and presenters who attended our online festivals in late 2023 and early 2024 and our July 2024 inperson festival. Vol Seven will also be available for sale at Adhocfiction.com (one of our festival sponsors) soon.

This violet-coloured anthology is the last of the ‘Rainbow Series’ of Festival anthologies. The red one was published in 2017 after the first Flash Fiction Festival and Volume five contains stories from the monthly online festivals that Jude hosted during the pandemic years in 2020 and 2021. We’re proud to show all seven covers together in the picture above.

If you are coming or would like to book for the 2025 in person festival, you have another opportunity to be published in our 2025 anthology. There are currently 8 places with accommodation left and ten without accommodation. We’re not sure of the colour for this year’s yet! We already have some stories to be published by the winners of the online festival days in late 2024 and January this year. (Read those in other blog posts on this site). Everyone who comes to the inperson festival can submit stories for consideration by Festival Director Jude Higgins and writer and Director of National Flash Fiction Day UK, Diane Simmons, who has helped compiled all of the seven anthologies

If you are a winner of the Pokrass Prize, the festival contest, you will also be published in the anthology

Hope to see you at the 2025 Festival! We have participants and presenters coming from all parts of the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Switzerland Cyprus, the US, Canada and India. It is very friendly and fun and there are so many excellent and inspiring workshops and panels to choose from as well as a bookshop devoted to the short form, the bar with Karaoke entertainment if you want, beautiful grounds and a quiet lounge to chat in with flash fiction friends.

I’m dellighted to announce the results of the mini writing contest from the online flash fiction day on 11th January. Thank you to everyone who entered. Stories were prompted by this painting, A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling by Evelyn Mary Dunbar (1906–1960) and a few suggestions from me (Jude) to create some funny flssh. Some people stayed close to the picture, some introduced women in other scenarios. I agree with our judge, Diane SImmons, that those who didn’t win should send their stories elsewhere for a chance of publication. So many excellent stories submitted. Many thanks again to Diane,,our resident online festival competition judge and co-director of National Flash Fiction Day, UK for choosing this selection. Here are her comments:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the entries to the competition. It made a wonderful change to read so many humorous stories. Some of the flashes made me laugh out loud and any that did automatically went into my shortlist pile. There were also several well written stories that I really enjoyed where the humour element of the challenge seemed to be forgotten, which was a shame – I’m sure that these stories would do well if submitted elsewhere.

First Prize:The Shape of a Winner

by Laurie Swinarton

Minutes ago, Cora Lambert held up broken arms, like surrender flags, and announced she can’t represent Bishop’s Hollow in the semi-finals of the Great British Topiary Shape Off and Daphne Tingle – member of the gardening club, bridge team captain and occasional shoplifter – can taste being Cora’s replacement. In the pebbledash village hall, under the flicker and buzz of fluorescent lights, she waits for the mayor to ask her. She downs a bottle of Corona then flays a grape and eats the innards. Grape skins are left behind like broken butterflies.

Daphne never set out to seriously hurt anyone. But she doesn’t want to be a loser. Decades ago, the girls in her PE class nicknamed her Deadweight Daffy. You know the type of girls. The ones with arms the size of oars, legs as swift as Shetland ponies. The ones who pinned athletic ribbons to their cardigans and stole cigar flavoured kisses from the men who worked at the carnival.

Now Cora’s announcement has created a hullabaloo. The mayor scratches her neck until it looks like she has a hickey. She whispers something to her bug-eyed husband. His eyebrows form exclamation marks then settle back down.

Daphne picks at a cuticle, thinks of her secateurs, imagines her hands snug in their worn, leather garden gloves, feels the weight of her shears as they twirl through a box hedge and transform it into an upward spiral before shaping it into the word WINNER. Her face almost bursts open, her body nearly extends itself like a climbing clematis seeking summer’s light. She’s no deadweight.

The mayor, who has IBS and too much paperwork, has a face that is sharp like a triangle. She taps her fingers on top of the microphone and, as dust rises, she declares the town will withdraw from the competition as there have been “accusations.”

And, for one second, Daphne closes her eyes and sees Cora Lambert’s tripod ladder folding in on itself like origami paper or a pair of collapsing binoculars. Her stomach turns sour; spicy fear pricks at her throat. She rifles through her tote bag: looks for Dramamine, an antacid, an escape. Instead pulls out glasses, an emery board … and a handful of steel bolts. Christ! She shoves everything back into the bag, pushes it away like it’s on fire. Her face blooms like a red azalea and she blows on her scorched hands.

Bio:Laurie Swinarton is a part-time writer and full-time tea addict who finds contentment buried in a book with a cup of lapsang souchong tea steeping nearby and Bach playing in the background. When not doing that, she can be found yelling out her window at loud cars. You can find her on Bluesky @laurieiswriting or on Twitter @LaurieSwin21

Diane Simmons’ comments
This flash about skulduggery in the Great British Topiary Shape Off competition made me smile from the first line, then laugh out loud at the phrase, ‘The mayor, who has IBS and too much paperwork…’ – a phrase that made the woman who was washing my hair at the hairdressers laugh too! I also loved the casual mention of Daphne Tingle’s shoplifting.

Runner up; A Pleasant Afternoon Spent Birding in Kent

by Erin Bondo
– after Evelyn Dunbar’s A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling

The orchard thrums with their varied pips and trills, with birds that’ve flocked here from all over. Loudest is the green woodpecker – there, with the red cap – her high-pitched tsiu-tsiu-tsiu-tsiu puncturing the thin winter air as she yaffles away at a joke only another Scouser would get. And that dunnock from Dorset – the wee plain thing, there on the right? – she’ll be warbling on again about some perceived slight: someone’s nicked her armband, someone’s nicked her hair brush, someone’s nicked her rations; somehow, someone’s always nicked her rations. And now that’s her chirping accusations at the shy West Country wren – it-was-you, Doreen, it-was-you!
Meanwhile, watch the magpie, a way up that tallest ladder. She’s a primper and a preener, sleek black hair in a high shine and pleasantly plump, all those extra butter rations no doubt. She’s trying to catch a glimpse of the Italian sparrows working the neighbouring land, she’ll make beady eyes at them on the way in from the fields, eyes that say meet me behind the garden shed at midnight – what Mr Magpie doesn’t know and all that.
And the yellow wagtail – there, on the left – she’s a plucky one, always chitter-chattering about her grand London debut once the males migrate back from the continent. Tonight in the dormitory she’ll put on a show for us, puff out her chest and waggle that tail like she’s Betty Grable in ‘Moon Over Miami’ until even the gloomy little stone-curlew cracks a smile – she’s gone a bit funny since that telegram arrived last week, the poor lamb.
But until the bell rings for tea here we’ll stay, churr-ing and chiff-chaff-ing away, making the best of this drab plumage, waiting for the day we can soar.

Bio: Erin Bondo grew up in rural Ontario, Canada on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Anishinabek and now lives in Scotland. She has been longlisted for the Welkin Mini prize and this is her first published flash piece. Find her on Bluesky @erinbondo.com

Diane’s comments

This was a clever and creative interpretation of the prompt that made me smile throughout and as soon as I’d finished reading, I went back to reread it. I particularly enjoyed the language in this flash.

Runner up;The Deadwood Stage

by Chris Cottom

The director doesn’t take to Terri, calls her a troublemaker, a Trotskyite. We call her the best thing to happen to collective bargaining since the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

We imagine our awayday will be some ‘outcome-focused’ bonding in a boutique hotel, playing with giant Lego, a facilitator yelling ‘One more minute!’ like a demented gameshow host. Instead, we’re mini-bussed to one of the director’s other businesses, an orchard outside Evesham, for a ‘pruning immersion experience’.

Terri’s eyes are fierce. ‘It’s a metaphor for redundancy. Deadwood. Geddit?’

‘Nah,’ I say. ‘You’re pulling my wire.’

‘Wanna bet? It’ll be Lean Team on the left, P45s on the right.’

The pressure starts in the ‘Briefing Zone’, ie shed, with not enough wellies and raincoats. ‘Listen,’ Terri shouts. ‘It’s obvious they want us fighting like barn cats. Stand firm, girls! Remember your grannies telling you about Greenham.’

We troop out through the mud, we chop and lop, we bundle and burn.

‘Be brutal with any branches rubbing together,’ the instructor says. ‘Keep the healthiest, the one in the best position.’

Terri nudges me. ‘Told you. And he’s no farmhand. Management consultant, more like. Look at his fingernails.’

When we break for lunch – pasty and apple turnover – the director’s Tesla is charging outside the juicing parlour.

‘He’ll be inside, practising his squeezing-the-pips speech,’ Terri says.

People say Terri’s a toughie, lives in a throuple, loves to arm-wrestle. We say she should tell the director where to shove his awayday.

She takes my loppers, whips out a nailfile, sharpens them gleaming. I expect the Tesla cable’s first for the chop, but Terri yanks off her headscarf and barges into the juicing parlour, calling the rest of us to follow.

The director is Alan Sugar without the charm. ‘Come to negotiate, Little Miss Red?’

Terri stands silent, arms crossed, loppers aloft.

‘I’ll lay it on the table,’ he says. ‘Redundancies for half the firm. Or everyone goes on zero-hours contracts.’

Terri kicks the table over. ‘There’s a third way, shithead! Employee ownership.’

‘No chance!’

Terri jabs the loppers into his crotch. ‘One move and these beauties bite.’

We form our community interest company that afternoon. The ex-director calls Terri a thug, a terrorist. We call her our saviour, our chief executive.

***Bio: Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. He has work published or forthcoming in 50-Word Stories, 100 Word Story, Eastern Iowa Review, Flash 500, Flash Frontier, Free Flash Fiction, NFFD NZ, NFFD UK, Oxford Flash Fiction, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, The Phare, and others. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien.
@chris_cottom1,@chriscottom.bsky.social, chriscottom.wixsite.com

Diane’s Comments
This was an engaging flash, with an original take on the prompt. I loved the idea of a ‘pruning immersion experience’ and laughed out loud at the line, ‘The director is Alan Sugar without the charm.’