Thanks again to Meg Pokrass for providing the picture prompt here and judging The Pokrass Prize, which was announced at the 2025 Flash Fiction Festival. Big congratulations to the winner, Eleanor Luke and the runners up, Rachael Dunlop and Tim Collyer. Here are Meg’s comments about all the entries and her comments on the individual stories are after the text. The stories will also be published in print in the 2025 Festival anthology, the first of the second rainbow series.

Meg’s General Comments:Selecting only one winner and 2 Runners-up from so many masterful stories was an impossible task yet again! It was thrilling to read such brilliant flashes. So many were absolute standouts, making it nearly impossible to choose. Photographer Fran Cassidy’s startling photo with its quiet secrets brought out the most incredible and original narratives one could have hoped for.

Congratulations to the top three winners. Please know that I loved reading each story. These were some of the strongest contest entries I have ever had the privilege to read.

Winner:
The Fearless Flying Florentines

by Eleanor Luke

Once a year, Beatrice, the last surviving member of the Fearless Flying Florentines, catches the number 23 bus to the old quarter of Florence and comes to this church. Today, there’s a group of boys clowning around in the square outside. They think she doesn’t hear them sniggering as she walks by in her fuchsia pink Crocs, old brown bag in the crook of her arm. But at 83, Beatrice’s hearing is even sharper than her tongue. She could give those whippersnappers a piece of her mind. They don’t scare her. It would take more than a group of pale, spotty boys to make her tremble. A full-twisting double somersault perhaps, performed by the love of her life, Alberto. Now that might get the adrenaline pumping! She pictures the sprawling big top at twilight, flags billowing in the breeze. Alberto’s magnificent muscular body clad in his bullet-silver leotard, hurtling through the air as the audience holds their breath, praying his fingers find the catcher’s in time. And now it’s Beatrice’s turn to dazzle as she steps inside the church as gracefully as she would step off the trapeze platform, swinging high above the sawdust by her knees. The ringmaster stands below, a mere multicoloured, top-hatted dot. She kneels before the altar now listening to the audience roar, their cheers reverberating through the rafters. A tear trickles down her cheek as she remembers how her father threatened to thrash her with his horse whip if she dared join the circus. How she trembled when her hands gripped the trapeze for the first time, a fog of chalk dust clouding her view. How she shook when she gave herself to Alberto, knowing he was married, treading the delicate tightrope between love and sin. She wipes her tears away now and reaches inside the brown bag, her fingers landing on the square of bullet-silver fabric, roughened by the passing of time. It’s the part that rested on Alberto’s heart the night it stopped beating. The night he performed his fatal final feat: a triple salto mortale, no safety net required. Beatrice lifts her gaze to the tendril of light weaving its way through the small window behind the altar and for one split second, she sees him. Her Alberto! The Fearless Flying Florentine! The most fearless of them all!

Comments by Meg Pokrass: The Fearless Flying Florentines’ is an epiphanic circus story for the ages. Admittedly I’m a sucker for a great circus story, and this is one of the most wonderful I’ve read. This story starring Beatrice, 83-year-old former member of the Fearless Florentines, is perfectly strange, beautiful and unpredictable in the ways of all great acts, and in the end we are deeply moved by Beatrice’s triumph. I admire the way backstory is sewn in deftly, creating a cinematic feeling of an entire life.

Eleanor Luke lives in Spain with her husband, kids occasionally and a small menagerie. Words in FreeFlashFiction, FlashFlood, Retreat West, Five on the Fifth, Roi Fainéant and Top Ten Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 2022. When not writing, Eleanor can be found eavesdropping on other people’s conversations and falling off bikes. Find her on BlueSky: @eleanor-luke.bsky.social.

Runner-Up:
glimpse

by Rachael Dunlop

it’s the heft of her adult self that bothers her as she lumbers past the grotto, Barbie
pink Crocs on her pale feet and her dead husband’s coat on her back, and lumber is the right
word, her body like a lump of wood, cut against the grain of herself, even while the inside of
her head is limber with words that flit away on tendrils of tentative association,

but anyway, she’s here with his (her husband’s) Mass missal in her bag, the soft black leather cover of the book rubbed back to buff along the edges, the pages so thin the words of
the different liturgies lay over each other in a palimpsest, the frayed place-keeper ribbon
tucked into the rear pages at the Prayers for the Dying,

prayers he started saying for himself as soon as those sniffles threatened pneumonia,and fair play, because no one else was going to be saying a prayer for him, living or dead, but
she, in some fit of weakness, couldn’t bring herself to put the missal in the bin along with the
rest of his trash

and so she’d asked Father McAuley if he could deal with it and of course, he’d said,using his normal voice and not the dull fog of a brogue with which he dispatched the Mass
like a chore, so she is taking the missal now to the church where she suspects it will lie in the
vestry with the lost property, bearing no more significance than a winter-damp wool glove or
a small toy car, dropped by a kneeling child and left to roll down the gentle camber of the
floor to altar rail, where shame would leave it unclaimed,

and over time the leather cover of the missal will soak in the incense-oiled air, the dust of confessed sins will settle into its threaded seams, and his (her husband’s) name,
written in black-blue ink on the flyleaf, will fade with him into anonymity,

and as she passes the grotto she claps the kneeling Mary Magdalen on her smooth marble head, not fondly, and finds gratitude, after all, for the heft of herself, for the swing of
her dead husband’s coat across her broad shoulders, for the slap of her bone white feet free in
her Crocs, because she knows neither husband nor priest will ever be able to coax her to
kneel again.

Comments by Meg Pokrass: ‘Glimpse’ knocked me off my feet. Here is a dark story about ridding oneself of a toxic spouse who, even in death, feels too close. This is story is beautifully conceived, and the writing is stunning. The quality in this story is that of a slow-burn exorcism. In the end, we feel the narrator’s spirit will survive.

Rachael Dunlop is a writer of fiction of all lengths, from micro to novel. She has been shortlisted for both the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bath Short Story Award among others and was highly commended in the Costa Short Story Award in 2021. She is a previous winner of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge, and Flash 500. A full range of her credits and selection of her stories can be viewed at rachaeldunlop@me.com

Runner-Up:
Negative Space

by Tim Collyer

My mother began disappearing from photographs on a Tuesday, from the ankles.

She was picky about which images released her. First—wedding photos held tight, but the ones where she’d blinked or frowned let go. By Thursday, she was waist-deep in absence, her torso floating in every frame on our walls.
“It’s just the chemicals,” Dad said, buying film like medicine. But I’d seen her practising, pulling herself apart like a magician’s scarf trick. Each morning, another piece of her slipped down the drain. She’d emerge paler, humming.

I caught her once, standing half-inside a mirror, tugging her reflection like it had sleeves. “It’s all angles,” she said, “You’ve got to make the soul slippery.” She practised on shadows, cat scepticism, Wednesday’s weakness, her own funeral reviews (“★★★½ – would die again”).
Then came the programmes. Not just names—quotes, fake florals. “All Gerald ever wanted,” she murmured through pretend sniffles, “was an urn that didn’t smell of soup.” She traced each name like a tendril of smoke, finding weakness in their finality.

She photocopied them at the library.

The psychiatrist blamed grief. Mother had started collecting funeral programs—not from services she’d attended, but future ones she’d found in thrift store suit pockets. “February 2047,” she’d read aloud. “Lovely turnout for Gerald.” She kept them in her tote bag, sorted by decade. Said she was rehearsing. Said if she vanished first, we’d cope better next time.

The morning she vanished completely, pink Crocs sat empty by the church steps. Inside, saints wept backwards—tears rising like helium. The pews had developed separation anxiety. Hymnals grew suspicious margins. The wedding photographer stood bewildered, his camera capturing only fog where Mother should have been.

Her final funeral program was dated yesterday. My name. But I’m still here, aren’t I? Standing before these statues, feeling strangely light. My own feet seem less certain today. The photographer aims at me now, and I wonder if I’ll show up in the image, or if I’m already learning her trick.

Dad keeps buying film. Boxes and boxes of it. He says if we take enough pictures, probability suggests she’ll accidentally appear in one. But I know better. She’s not gone—she’s just attending her collection now, sitting in pews that don’t exist yet, already mourning us.

The photographer clicks. I check his screen. My ankles are missing.
(Caption: Family portrait, 1997. Developed 2047. Finally ready.)

Comments by Meg Pokrass: ‘Negative Space’ is a surreal story about a mother who disappears in stages, beginning in photographs. The story involves time travel and is one of the most imaginative pieces I’ve read. Each line is strange, funny, dark surprise. A deliciously Kafkaesque story about the horror of time passing.

Tim Collyer is a Wiltshire-based writer whose work spans speculative fiction, literary drama, and darkly comic storytelling. His recent accolades include winning the New2theScene Flash Fiction Competition, placing as Runner-up in the Pokrass Flash Fiction Award, and placing as Runner-up in the DuMaurier Literature Award. Alongside a career in financial services, he writes stories that explore the surreal edges of everyday life.