Congratulations to the winner and the two runners-up from the online festival day creative writing challenge on October 24th. Writers were asked to write a cnf or a fiction flash about a journey involving a hot air balloon, a bus, train or other transport. Thank you to everyone who came to the online day and to those who entered the mini contest. I hope writers who didn’t win will go on and submit elsewhere. There were some really good and inventive journey stories in the mix.

Thanks very much to co-director of National Flash Fiction Day UK and writer, Diane Simmons for judging again. She has done so for many years now and we really appreciate her for her judging work.

The winner on this occasion is Linda Grierson-Irish from the UK and the two runners-up are Helen Newdick and Emma Williams, also from the UK. Their stories and bios are posted below and will be also published in the Flash Fiction Festival Anthology volume ten. As well as publication they receive books published by Ad Hoc Fiction and free entries to bathflashfictionaward.com

Winner

Nearly Somewhere

by Linda Grierson-Irish

We waited forever for the French taxi, but now the tock-tocka-tock of the indicator has spun us onto the wrong side of a wide road and we’re breathing in pine air-freshener with a sickly coating of stubbed out cigarette. A small doll with a red hat and only half an arm dangles from the rear-view mirror.

My father nods along in the front, smiling big. His crown of hair springs up into a frill when he pulls off his faded blue cap.

“Look!” says our mother. “Red squirrels!” Her voice startles me. It’s her old voice from the old house, before we had to share a rental with swarms of silver fish. Stacey pinches me for blocking the window, but I don’t care. I’m an expert squirrel-spotter now. I count five at least before the trees thin out, creating a flickering, blue sky-map. The outside air starts tasting of summer holiday.

“Nearly there.” We are nearly somewhere. The world’s jolliest man will beckon us into a hotel lobby. Dad’ll twirl Mum around the polished marble floor, like in that photo I found face-down in the landing drawers, until she’s dizzy with laughing. There’ll be games. Peanuts in deep dishes. Maybe even drinks with straws. Later we’ll flop onto patio loungers and feed red squirrels with ice-cream.

We won’t have to wait in a gloomy reception on scratched, plastic seats. There won’t be a camel-faced woman behind the counter, hoofing her keyboard and swerving me a look when my toe-crimping shoes bang against the chair leg. After my father bustles back, briefcase bulging, there won’t be another journey, another wait, more silence. We won’t sleep in a creaky motel room with lightbulbs hissing like pythons. Dad won’t yell at Mum that he’s doing his best. Mum won’t suddenly stop, part-way through mixing four hot chocolates from three tiny packets, as if she’s forgotten why she’s holding a spoon.

But tomorrow, we’ll go to the seaside. The sky will look blue again. Until my eyes adjust to the light.

***

Diane’s comments:
This is a beautifully written flash full of wonderful descriptions. The contrast between the imagined hotel lobby where there will be ‘Peanuts in deep dishes. Maybe even drinks with straws’ and the reality of what the narrator is actually going to experience, is heartbreaking. The ending is just perfect

Bio awaited

Runner-up

Hot air ballooning over an American airbase, by accident

by Helen Newdick

The air feels still, but there is always drift up there. Drifting is what this is all about.

It’s a summer evening in the late eighties (loadsamoney, CND, peace camps). Four of us drive to a field on the Oxford side of the Berkshire Downs to climb into a big wicker basket. We are ready to shoot the breeze. Our balloon with its red, orange and green bands has the propane burners on it and is ready to go too. Funny to realise the obvious, that our weight isn’t enough to hold it. Much more hot air and we’re taking the truck we’re tethered to with us. Its front wheels are already starting to lift off the ground.

In the moment of release, we are gone; in seconds, surging silently skyward. We level out to an elegant glide. The high sides of the basket are the only thing between us and the rolling miniaturised land below with its patterns of hedgerows, ploughed fields, roads and houses. It’s exactly as James Sadler described to the Oxford Journal two hundred years earlier, reporting the ‘Experiment of his Fire Balloon.’  For a time, we share his experience. How ‘in his elevated Situation he perceived no Inconvenience, and, being disengaged from all terrestrial Things, contemplated a most charming distant View.’

Mr Sadler floated six calm and serene miles from Christ Church meadows in Oxford to ‘a small Eminence betwixt Islip and Woodeaton. We float to Greenham Common military airbase. We were not supposed to. No one in their right mind enters the air space of a Cruise missile stronghold defended by an alien superpower deliberately. We practically hear the women offering up their peace songs, either in prayer, or in celebration of our passing rainbow colours. Nothing to be done. We are blow-ins, spindrift. When the wind fails to come up with an alternative route, our pilot radios down to warn the airbase of our approach. Thankfully, a last-minute change of wind direction saves us. The Americans aren’t happy with our brief trespass, but they resist neutralising us. We veer away, yearning too for a breezier stewardship of the world.

After that, a rough landing (earrings out, glasses off) with the basket tipping over and dragging us across a field seems —as Mr Sadler himself, first English balloonist, one time pastry chef might have put it — a piece of cake.

***

Diane’s comments
This was a very enjoyable piece of creative nonfiction with some effective detail. I particularly enjoyed the 1980s being summed up as ‘loadsamoney, CND, peace camps’ and thought the addition of quotes from Mr Sadler added to the flash, particularly the ending.

Bio awaited

Runner-up

Comfort zone

By Emma Williams

You pin the letter from Santander onto the cork-board next to the tattoo design you know you’ll never get and the ‘Walking with wolves’ voucher that ran out in March. So, you finally own your two-up two-down. Now what?

Hot air balloon ride? You hate that it’s a bucket list cliché but it’s time to get out there. Imagine reaching the end of your life, lying flat on your back, listening to the slow beep beep of the heart monitor and running through all the things you should have done.

Think of Frida Kahlo on the bus, happily bobbing along holding onto her innocent wicker basket just before the crash and the handrail through the abdomen. Charles-Valentin Alkan taking that book from the top of his rickety bookshelf. Elvis Presley, Lenny Bruce, Whitney Houston alone in their bathrooms.

Okay, the short list: Cappadocia, Luxor, Serengeti.

***

You hadn’t expected sixteen passengers, most of them honeymooners, most of them American. There’s a lot of whooping. You could do without the champagne breakfast but it’s included in the price. Mercutio(!) the child-pilot, pops the corks and raises toast after toast. To us. To the Serengeti. To ticking off the bucket list. Cringe.

It’s cold. That’s the problem with sunrise experiences.

There’s a lot of setting up, the balloon lies in the dust like a spent condom.

Take off is rocky. The smell of propane and warm nylon alarming. You’re jolted against a solid woman with a leopard-print jacket and a ravaging glare.

You grasp the wicker basket with freezing fingers. The jockeying for position is won by the live-streamers. You are edited out of the sepia sky. You are not Instagramable. The whoosh of flames, the disconcerting silence between bursts, more whooping. You hope you turned the gas off.

Migration was early this year; the wildebeest gone. Other things you learn about the wildlife: they run from the burners and the shadow of the balloon.

They are a long way down. They blend into the yellow ochre of the parched earth.

***

You lie flat on your broken back, your pelvis as shattered as Frida Kahlo’s and wonder why that tree has been spread with a huge red and white tablecloth, a giant picnic basket set on top at a jaunty angle. Seed pods the size of people.

Through the shimmering heat-haze, the slow deliberate approach of yellow ochre animals.

***

Diane’s comments:
I very much enjoyed the humour and effective descriptions in this flash. I could just picture the sixteen passengers squeezed into the balloon basket and the image of the balloon lying in the dust ‘like a spent condom’ made me smile.

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 three novels: The Tortoise (2021), Nothing but the Truth (2023) and her new novel Edgar was published in March. She lives in Shropshire, UK. Instagram: tortoise_books. She also won runner-up in the February 2026 flash fiction festival day.