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.

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.

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.
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.

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.