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.
