Thank you to Meg Pokrass for again supplying prompts and image and judging the 2026 Pokrass prize which was announced at the festival. Anyone who came to the festival was eligible to enter and there was a quite a bunch of stories submitted. Thank you to everyone who participated. I hope that those who didn’t win will be published elsewhere.
Meg said:
“Choosing one winner and only 2 honourable mentions from a banquet of masterful micros was an impossible task. It was brilliant to read such innovative and moving flashes. A good number of them were serious standouts, making it nearly impossible to whittle it down this far. I’d like all of the submitting writers to know that I was amazed by the entries this year, and if your story wasn’t chosen as one of the top three, it doesn’t mean it isn’t wonderful. There were simply too many great ones, and it always comes down to what an individual judge’s tastes are. As a group of entries, they were some of the most amazing flashes I have had the privilege to read. A big congratulations to the winners.”
The winners received books from Ad Hoc Fiction, Bath Flash Fiction Award entries and will be published in the print anthology from this year’s festival as well as being published here online. Congratulations to all. First prize, David Swann and Runners-up, Philippa Bowe and Maggie Fawcett.You can read their brilliant stories below. It’s so interesting to read different takes on the image and to get different takes on words Meg suggested to include.
First Prize by David Swann
Cabin Fever with Bob Ross
In the beginning there was light: a strange, alluring radiance. Then, inevitably, he added the pines, as in 90% of his paintings.
It was Bob Ross, after all. So this was Alaska, where he’d been a shouty air-force instructor, before he became wise and soothing. And asked his barber for a perm.
Imagine it. Bob Ross, perm-free. Shouting.
Well, gods are allowed origin-stories. And even gentle deities can be capricious – as shown by what happened next.
Just two of Bob’s 381 TV paintings contained people. And only one a couple.
Yet, inexplicably, he added us: two sketchy figures, on the clearing’s edge. Why, we never discovered. Our role: to turn away (faces are tricky), and walk on, into a world emptied of people.
Critics have questioned this absence of humanity, suggesting Bob struggled, technically, with mammals. Or suffered certain social anxieties.
Maybe that explained our mutual awkwardness as we walked. If Bob loaded the brush with memories of his feuding parents, perhaps we brooded on love’s pains.
So it was a relief to stumble upon one of the log-cabins featured in a fifth of Bob’s work. It was totally empty, of course. But maybe, if I acquired survival-skills, and learned to build furniture, we’d create a refuge, together.
Then, outside, we heard him humming contentedly.
Bob’s fans will know what that meant.
‘He’s adding a huge, superfluous tree,’ I warned my companion, whose white dress suggested bridal leanings.
Our creator towered above, mixing together an ominous orange.
‘Stop,’ cried my bride, if that’s what she was. ‘There’s radiance, Bob. You don’t need sunsets!’
But, of course, he’s dumping snow now, too.
‘We’ll freeze,’ she cried. ‘Bob’s so strangely anti-human, he rarely even paints chimneys.’
‘We’re free here, though,’ I said, meeting her gaze. ‘Isn’t that Bob’s teaching? We can do anything…’
‘Darling,’ I added.
She pointed a finger at her mouth, and mimed being sick.
Then a gigantic eye peered in. And –lo –Bob spoke as if he’d entered our hearts and understood all our doubts and fears. Though he addressed his soothing wisdom to some wider audience, every word seemed intended for us.
‘Be so very light,’ he said. ‘Be a gentle whisper.’
It was the message we needed.
‘I’m sorry I was forward,’ I whispered. ‘From today, I’ll treasure our marriage, if that’s what it is.’
‘And I’ll be kinder to you,’ she said, lightly, ‘whoever you are.’
Meg’s Comments:
‘Cabin Fever with Bob Ross’ is an epic piece of metafiction if ever there was one. It not only had me belly laughing, but the story also knocked me off my feet with its ingenuity. For those who aren’t familiar with the 1970s American artist celebrity Bob Ross, he was known for popular Canadian TV show The Joy of Painting in which he guided want-to-be artists through accessible “paint-by-numbers” techniques. Many people found his method calming and therapeutic, where others found his work to be mass-produced and simplistic. To quote the story, “Just two of Bob’s 381 TV paintings contained people. And only one couple.” The idea of extending this reality to two unfortunate and formless characters, trapped in a Bob Ross landscape, is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. I won’t say more, but with a concept this darkly funny and brilliant, it’s hard to live up to its potential, but it did.
Bio: David Swann’s Season of Bright Sorrow (Ad Hoc Fiction) won the 2021 Bath Novella-in-Flash Competition, and was named Rubery Book of the Year in 2023. Another novella, The Twisted Wheel, finished runner-up in the 2022 Bath competition. His stories and poems have won many awards (including eleven at The Bridport Prize and two in the National Poetry Competition). He recently won second prize in the 33rd Bath Flash Fiction Award. His collection The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), about his residency in a prison, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize. After many years as a university lecturer, Dave now works at Cumbria University as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.
Runner-up by Philippa Bowe
The Weight of Feathers
‘My face is too weird,’ says the boy, though she knows he’s not really a boy, of course she does, but the habit sticks to her fast as the burr on the hem of her nightgown the first time she took her newborn into the green grass-waving garden, and now here it is choked by snow and her baby is eighteen. She wants to say, your face is perfect, your face is the sun and moon and stars, but she knows better. She knows he’ll get up from his fireside seat and start pacing again, stalking walls that feel too narrow since the room filled with his caged energy, his hunger to get out, now, now, now, fuck the snowstorm.
‘Say I was a kitten, you wouldn’t choose me, right? The runt with a stupid face…you wouldn’t, Mum.’ She looks up from her sewing, she tries to smile away the wrong words but they slip out anyway, ‘I’d always choose you, darling.’ He’s up and over by the window and pressing his beautiful forehead against the glass. She imagines it shattering, fat snowflakes whirling in and snatching him. Her baby who struggles. She hears the fear undertowing his words. She remembers the bullying, the tears, the jibes of children who can’t forgive difference.
She bends her head over her work. The bag of small silky feathers, white as the snow, gathered for years. Fine gold thread and a needle so tiny she can barely see it, tiny diamond flashing in her fingers as she binds the feathers together, hundreds of them. She’s nearly done now, wings that sweep and flutter, wings to keep her baby above them all.
He’s suddenly behind her, waft of laundry-fresh cotton and sweat, leaning on her shoulders with both hands. ‘Mum, I’m okay. I don’t need them.’ He doesn’t need wings. He doesn’t need her. Her needle skids and pierces her palm. ‘The snow’s stopped. I’m walking down to the station.’ She licks the beading of blood so her tongue is busy. ‘Mum, come with me. It’ll be beautiful, a frosty walk together. You can go and spend the evening with auntie.’ He’s making her snug with reassurance, her lovely baby. The feathers are weights crushing her lap. The boy holds out a hand to her. She can do it, she can rise and take it, she can go into the snow with him.
Meg’s Comments:
‘The Weight of Feathers’ is the story about the difficulty in letting go of a disabled adult child. The mother’s life has grown to revolve around making her son feel well. And yet, what we understand to be true in the beginning of the story changes in the end, when we suddenly see that our original impression may have been limited. It may be that the mother needs her son more than he needs her. Both characters are stuck in a pattern that can’t be broken, and it hardly matters what is or isn’t factually true. The effect of this story is that of a reversible image.
Bio: Philippa Bowe is a flash fiction writer, poet and translator. Her work has been published online and in print, including by Ghost City Press, Reflex Fiction, Bath Flash Fiction and Spark2Flame. She is writing a flash novella, lives on a southern French hill and has become addicted to big vistas.
Runner-up by Maggie Fawcett
The Snowbirds
bread, milk, eggs,
Richard recites the shopping list from memory as he folds and turns the sheets draped across the radiators.
“Why does everything take so bloody long to dry?”
The boiler flame hisses as the thermostat clicks the heating into another cycle. Condensation trickles down the paintwork, tainting the air with the chemical odour of laundry soap and disinfectant.
vegetables, fruit, yoghurt,
“Those birds bring bad luck.”
“What birds?”
“The snowbirds up there on the roof,” Alice said, gazing out through the smeared glass of the picture window.
“Not the snowbirds again,” Richard sighs, as he steps over a ragged pile of stained cushions, a barricade to stop Alice wandering into the kitchen, where he had found her filling the toaster to make tea.
“Oh, Richard look, it will flood the room with light, summer and winter, just the perfect spot to sit and read,” Alice said, when they had first viewed the house.
“You remind me of a freckled, marmalade cat basking in the sun,” Richard said, whenever he had caught sight of Alice curled up on her beloved purple sofa, book in hand.
biscuits, ice cream, juice,
“I remember kissing him many a time,” Alice said, pointing at a framed photograph of herself and Richard sitting in the garden, taken against a back ground of roses in full bloom.
“He was a handsome chap.”
“Wasn’t bad,” Alice shrugged.
pasta, mince, washing up liquid,
“Snowbirds bring bad luck.”
“Alice, they’re seagulls, come inland to wait out the winter. On the lookout for a slice of burnt toast or a plate of leftovers,” Richards says, as he wraps his arms around her wasted body, a reminder of meals spooned onto tables, into pockets, trodden into the carpet.
“The sitter will be here soon. Do we need anything from the shops?”
“Snowbirds.”
“Well, in that case, give us a kiss,” Richard says, pursing his lips into an exaggerated pout.
“Fool,” Alice laughs, as she brushes her dry lips against his stubbled cheek, before they turn and stare up at the pair of seagulls, hunkered down in a flightless vigil.
toilet roll, bleach, wipes,
Meg’s Comments:
‘The Snowbirds’ is a story about a man coping compassionately with his wife’s dementia while reciting a daily shopping list he’s learned by heart. Dementia is a subject that can feel overused in fiction, but here the author makes it fresh again through their work with poetic micro sections, bringing to life the couple’s saddening yet always tender interactions. Each tiny section is headed by 3 items on his shopping list, and the last 3 items are devastating. Such a cleverly conceived and beautifully executed story.
Bio: Maggie Fawcett took up creative writing following her recent retirement from working in health care.This is her first competition prize and first time published-.she is beyond excited. She lives on the North Yorkshire coast in the UK
