FFF Competition Thirty Judge’s Report by Nish X. Hegde
26th November 2025
Introduction:
Being invited to contribute to this competition is a true honour. I feel fortunate to have encountered such powerful works and enjoyed the bemusement of loved ones who were forced to finally learn what flash fiction even means.
As someone passionate about this form, I want to share my thoughts on what makes flash fiction shine before diving into the remarkable pieces in this edition. My hope is to spark your curiosity, encourage you to explore these stories in full, join the vibrant flash community, and maybe even inspire you to write your own. If you are instead here only for praise or a memorable quote for your WordPress, you will find that, too: the irony of submitting a very long report about very short work is not lost on me. Above all, I hope everyone who reads this finds at least something meaningful within these reflections.
Approach:
To newcomers, flash fiction might seem esoteric, even academic. But my perspective is that flash is everywhere. It is, perhaps, the most prevalent way things are read by human beings. A street sign warning ‘commit no nuisance’, an entire lifetime squeezed onto the epigraph on a headstone–these are flash.
The difference between mere flash text and flash fiction then, is simply that the latter elevates this brevity to the level of literature. It is about choices made carefully about every possible element of a work due to the necessity of its constraints. No other form is as meticulous, except perhaps poetry which often becomes indistinguishable from flash fiction at times. But where poetry embraces abstraction, flash fiction values precision. Flash is the art of discipline, the discipline of art that could only achieve meaning because it is flash.
Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House for example, would be inferior as a short story, even though her abilities are indisputable. It is excellent because every word is carefully chosen. Like a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant, there needn’t be much. What is there, however, is deliberate and rich, and somehow leaves you feeling completely full anyway. Absence, ambiguity, context, title: because the reader has no choice but to consider the work by what is not told to them, flash fiction can achieve an impact that is truly unique.
I personally think of two examples when asked about my own favourites. One is Joyce Carol Oates’ Widow’s First Year:
I kept myself alive.
The other is the collective work by Bardd Cenedlaethol Cymru Gwyneth Lewis defacing the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, twin inscriptions that read:
In these stones, horizons sing / Creu gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen (“creating truth like glass from inspiration’s furnace.”)
There is no single formula for writing flash. The key is deliberate choice; that's where the magic happens. In judging FFF Competition 30, my own preferences for genre or mood were trivial. Instead, I focused on each work's intent and execution. I looked for flash that is effortless yet expertly crafted. Each piece should breathe with originality, impact, and formal mastery, it should be the best possible version of whatever it is trying to be. That did not make the task any easier, of course, but it was thrilling to read such a diverse anthology of work, and my comments on this edition’s top-ranked submissions are presented below.
The Longlist:
This year’s field is impressively broad in both the craft and art of literary flash. The longlist was strikingly committed to an economy of their ‘tell’ so that the clarity of their ‘show’ could shine. The set as a whole struck me for their particular sophistication of motif, rhythm, and symbolism, letting careful imagery reveal complex emotional and narrative journeys in a matter of lines rather than paragraphs.
Some interesting themes emerged across the works, which made for thought-provoking comparisons when considering them side-by-side. A recurring theme was liminality: thresholds and tipping points across spaces like hospitals and urban streets, or constructs like etiquette, employment, or time. Many gracefully found the extraordinary within the ordinary. Often, there were surreal or speculative elements. Satire and confession appeared alongside alternate histories and the almost mythic supernatural.
The group could not have been more diverse in mood, tone, and even form. However, what distinguished them was an emphasis on voice-driven storytelling with compelling characters, personalities, and settings. These works consistently build context with carefully chosen descriptions. The white space does as much work as the explicit content. As a result, each work ends with a sense of inevitability and the gentle authority of completeness.
This experience has demonstrated quite thoroughly that this is a truly vibrant and talented community of writers. If these are the representatives of flash literature, then that ought to be a matter of pride. In recognition of that expansive range of work, I’d like to offer brief commendations on the longlistees before providing my detailed reviews of the final six.
Albemarle Street: A gentle nocturne with beautiful and compassionate portraits and a beautifully rhythmic mood that celebrates humane mundanity by building a tableau from its sketches.
Cat on a Hot Summer Evening: Stylish, daring, and (no pun intended) cinematic. The abstraction elevates a highly precise portrait of human connection. Its tense realism paints a precise portrait of its characters. It more than lives up to its deliberate artistic allusions.
Ink is Thicker Than Blood: Excellently fluent despite its use of allegory. Creative use of voice and metaphor leads the reader through the paradoxes of family and time. The narrator’s inanimacy is the perfect foil for the question it asks: what do we create freely, and what do we unknowingly owe our predecessors?
Jane Eyre Cures My Writer’s Block: Earnest, imaginative, abstract, and excitingly metafictional in its unconventional illustration of the line between devoted admiration and helpless obsession.
Reunion: Graceful, understated, sensitive, and able to hold its emotional contradictions and intelligent ambiguities precisely because of the confronting second-person narration, which forces us to inhabit the disconcerting headspace of facing tomorrow while being unable to look away from yesterday.
Still Ticking: A technically elegant work with effortless details and subtle emotional movement that moves briskly with terse sentences that emphasise its underlying message about the indifferent march of time.
The Hum: Subtly escalating vignettes deftly explore the psychology of silence. A smartly built sense of place nimbly recontextualises itself at the end. This leaves the reader wanting to read it all over again.
Unmarked: Admirable in its restraint, never falling into sentimentality, and singular in its exploration of a person simply standing still. The beauty of this story lies in the way it nevertheless produces an entire lifetime through monologue, ultimately revealing that the absence is precisely the point.
Unsocial Worker: A modern epistolary dialogue that uses sharp wit as a tool. It builds the dissonant mood that comes with exhaustion and despair. The story conveys the helplessness of being confined by obligations imposed by the system.
The Shortlist:
The shortlisted pieces span genre, voice, and style. These works offer grounded realism as well as elegiac lyricism. They are set in exacting points in time and place, they are set beyond time and place altogether. Some serve as social commentary, others as studies of the the psyche. But what they all have in common is that they are distinguished by their precision, originality, and their daring. In short, these pieces were all excellent submissions in their own right, but left a profound impact that would exist no other way than by being crafted the way they were. Suffice it that these comments cover only some of the many merits of these works: their skilful double meanings that reward repeated reading, or their inventive and subtle choices in vocabulary, tone, and perspective. I strongly encourage you to read them in full if you have time. There’s much to delight in each.
The works are presented alphabetically in their ranks. Alongside my comments, I’ve included a standout excerpt from the work, and—in the spirit of inspiring further reading and celebration of their calibre—a recommendation of a comparable work outside the flash fiction genre.
In conclusion: congratulations, wow, and happy reading.
Shortlisted: Aspirations, by Joanna Miller
“Later, I thought she might have been crying, but it was hard to tell with all the partying, yelling, and other shit going on downstairs.”
Commentary:
This piece immediately stands out with its opening line, a reference to a 1990 photograph by Mary Ellen Mark, before unfolding in bold ekphrasis - it takes what is known and captures the psyche of the subjects over a single summer’s day. Without our knowledge of class, place, age, and time, it could not be at all notable - except, like all of the best flash fiction, it is enhanced specifically because of its situation within reality, and not just merely as an adjunct to it. Linguistically, it has exactly the right style of plain-spoken narrative voice that naturally reveals the innocence and peril of childhood and brings the reader into the chasm between what is true and what is imagined, what is overheard and what is unsaid. This piece is subtle, aching, and ultimately completely human in its masterful study of yearning, class, and idolisation. Friendship here is a lifeboat, and the aspirations held by a child for her elder cousin are a bittersweet vision of rescue.
You’ll Love This If You Liked:
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
*
Shortlisted: Mama Says, by Emma Phillips
“Animal law is not for equals; some creatures thrive on division.”
Commentary:
Lyrical, yet direct, this piece is rooted in exile, endurance, and the power of naming. Through the subtle transformation of inherited wisdom, our image of the characters takes on a patina of resistance, with a repeated cadence that approaches a chant. Home is not erased but carried within, and the narrator's implied dependence on their mother’s teachings stands as both a testament to maternal strength and the complex relationship of heritage that newer generations sometimes have no choice but to build second-hand. The final image, despite seemingly adopting the longest-running cliché of all, manages to make a precise point about exile–that the nourishing security of belonging is a prerequisite for fulfilment, and without it, we are left instead with pain.
You’ll Love This If You Liked:
The House by Warsaw Shire
*
Shortlisted: They Start By Banning Indigo by Chris Cottom
“She nods when I mention my aqua blue boxers, knows I’m up for the fight.”
Commentary:
By stark contrast, They Start by Banning Indigo is instead a political satire about conformity and defiance, with the natural thread that creativity is itself a form of resistance to oppression. This piece moves at a rapid pace, suggesting that many months, or even years, pass over the course of the story. The protagonist is instantly evocative and thrillingly irrepressible, but it is the narrator's anxiety as she observes her that drives the work's complexity at its heart. While in stark contrast to some of the other pieces, which serve as contemplative snapshots of a moment in time, there is an unexpected tenderness at the heart of an original and creative analogy about family, resistance, and, by the end, the profundity of legacy.
You’ll Love This If You Liked:
The Giver by Lois Lowry
*
Highly Commended: Dream Catcher, by Karen Arnold
“I take those too; my pockets are deep.”
Commentary:
This was perhaps the piece that stuck with me the longest, one that most demanded subsequent readings to fully puzzle out. Diving into the realms of magical realism, it embodies a mythic voice that dances between what can be understood and what is beyond imagination. The contrasting settings of dream and sterile hospital, the elegiac imagery that connects modern healing to ancient, long-forgotten arts: all of this is a powerful vehicle for its subtly implied observations about age, weakness, and pain. Yet beneath its meditative calm runs moral unease: what is mercy, what is theft? This story achieves uncommon scope within its brief frame; the hospital is transformed into a cross-section of human existence through the perspective of its titular dream catcher. Ultimately, this is a complex and ambiguous meditation on compassion, and the laborious effort required to let go and find peace.
You’ll Love This If You Liked:
Widening Circles / The Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke
*
Highly Commended: Sap, by Stuart Cavet
“She smells like she’s soiled herself, and in a way she has.”
Commentary:
Visceral, humid, and darkly funny, Sap fuses eroticism and decay into a surreal duet between human desire and vegetal appetite. The only story in the longlisted set to be presented as a single, dense paragraph, it uses an almost baroque diction and some truly inventive lexical wordplay to pulse with an almost threatening excess that never quite fails to be precisely balanced. This gives it an unsettling grotesqueness, a humour that hides an incisive emotional intelligence. This is a story that knows how to chart the haphazard way that fascination tips into infection, attraction into consumption. Sap dares the reader to taste rot and still find beauty there — a bold, sensuous exploration of surrender that rewards multiple readings.
You’ll Love This If You Liked:
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
*
Competition Winner: After Dinner by Caroline McKenzie
“I taste the anaesthetic. I haven’t learned to like it.”
Commentary:
This was the shortest entry longlisted for this edition, yet also among the most complete due to its exploration of social niceties and the constraints they impose. Through a simple dinner-party farewell, it presents social tension and private violation, using concise language to illustrate the contrast between civility and underlying brutality. The narrative examines etiquette, fear, obligation, and uncertainty within a brief format. There is no overt exposition or clear moral. Instead, it demonstrates the impact of what is unspoken and the particular strengths of flash fiction. The style is economical and exacting, with spare yet developed characters. Its depiction of silence, rather than confession, creates a quietly impactful realism. The work’s effect lingers through its restraint, delivering its meaning without excess. Where directness might dominate elsewhere, this story relies on subtlety and implication.
You’ll Love This If You Liked:
Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian
Nish X. Hegde
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