FlashBack Fiction

In 1960… by Grace Palmer …my husband tapped the teaspoon on the crème brûlèè and the yellow crust cracked. Egg yolk and cream spilled onto the cloth and my stomach wavered. The foetus curled, I swear, somersaulting and dreaming in…

2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition First Place Plum Jam by Frances Gapper From our ladders we can see the plum-blue Malverns. The army’s bought up this harvest, still on the trees. We pickers are a crew: boy scouts, gypsies, PoWs, refugees,…

2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition Second Place Ogdens by Gaynor Jones She scoops a clump of dirt-brown tobacco from the barrel and tries not to think of gunpowder. She pinches the right amount, packs it into the paper and tries…

2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition Third Place Potato Masher by Jake Sullins He’d found the stick grenade half-buried in mud in a bend of the Somme, in the days after Amiens, and he’d carried it clipped to his haversack through…

2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition Highly Commended Casus Belli by Melanie Haws John Haas went to war, aged twenty-three, a plumber’s helper, with a few dollars saved, and a picture of his Dresden-doll sweetheart he carried in his left breast-pocket; he…

2018 FlashBack Fiction Microfiction Competition Highly Commended Life After Death by Jennifer Moore After he died they put a stranger in his stitched-up shell, sewing his name into the fellow’s mud-mushed brain to keep it from slipping. They gave the…