FFF Competition Twenty-Eight Judge’s Report by S.A. Greene
22nd July 2025
Thank you, Ian, for giving me the opportunity to judge this round. Thank you, also, to the writers of all 15 longlisted stories for offering such beautiful words and images to savour. While it was a privilege to select a shortlist of 6, it meant leaving behind 9 wonderful stories. I particularly appreciated the timely theme of ‘First, Do No Harm’ and the way the title works so cleverly with the story. I loved the gorgeous descriptions in ‘Pentecost’ and the way the endings of ‘Pirates’, ‘The Year of The Rooster’ and ‘I’ve Been Expecting You’ open up their respective stories rather than closing them down, causing them to resonate long after I stopped reading. I admired the skill with which technical detail was interwoven with very human emotions in ‘A New Episode of Dancing On Ice, an Old, Old Longing’ and ‘After Removing My Clown Shoes, I Don't Know What Else To Wear' (fab title, by the way!) ‘People are Lunatics’ charmed me with the voice of the cantankerous main character, and I was impressed and deeply moved by the portrait of a very relatable individual about to be subjected to an inhuman act in ‘An Unquantifiable Daydream’.
But I was allowed only 6 stories and, in the end, the following spoke to me with the most eloquence and persistence:
Shortlisted
Between Dust and Desolation
This story of a parched physical and emotional landscape is brought to life with skilful use of specific and sensory details. I loved the light-touch but evocative ‘Red ants, a few beetles. Flies. The sinuous path left by a snake.’ Careful attention to tone and pacing allows the full bleakness of Joe’s situation to become apparent as the story plays out. Yet despite his predicament, his love for Anna softens the piece with a fragile warmth and light. The closing paragraph at first appears to open up the story to the possibility of hope, yet even that is undermined as the final words reinforce Joe’s bitter helplessness.
Grief Has Good Manners
Ah, this one crept up on me, strengthening its hold with each reading. In fact, the writing has much in common with the character of Grief in the story - starting quietly, gently, maintaining a lowkey tone throughout, yet at the same time getting right under the skin. This flash, which is elegantly sparing with adjectives and free of sentimentality, illuminates the loneliness that comes from the loss of a formerly shared domestic life by showing Grief as a guest in the home: ‘You pour tea. He stirs his silently. Later, he says little during dinner, except to note how tender the roast is, how quiet the house has become.’ There’s a hint of a dry, wise wit here, and at the same time the all-pervasive nature of grief and loss and loneliness is conveyed with great poignancy. A skilfully crafted and resonant piece of writing.
My Flatweave Flatmate
I was intrigued by this title and thoroughly expected to enjoy the story: I wasn’t disappointed! In just 300 words this quirky and original piece made me smile and wonder and think and feel sad. It delighted me that the flatmate’s action is entirely logical yet utterly bonkers at the same time. The dialogue and the humour made for a pacy read: ‘You’re clean-line linoleum, while I’m twisty-wistful,’ she says sadly. ‘Go and swipe right on a nice piece of laminate.’ The voices of the narrator and the main character are strong and distinct, the tone punchy and propulsive, yet despite this – or perhaps because of it – I ached all the more for both characters at the end.
Highly Commended:
The Cartographer’s Last Shore
With its central metaphor of memory as coastline, this story conjures up gorgeous images to create a strong yet flickering sense of place and non-place, an ever-changing landscape of the mind and the shore: ‘Today, the sea whispered coordinates I’d never drawn—ghostly inlets, forgotten harbours.’ The relationship between the two characters is fundamental to this story and it is skilfully brought to life through dialogue that is as authentic as it is concise:
‘ “Margaret, what if I told you I can see every coastline that ever was?”
“You’ve been staring at maps too long.” ‘
A misty ambiguity pervades this story, and despite reading it over and over I was left with a sense of uncertainty and some unanswered questions, but this only served to enhance my reading experience, immersing me in the uncertainties of the characters and their shared psychological coastline.
The New Perfection Refrigerator, 1930s
This piece grabbed me early on, with the word 'Damn' and bowled me along all the way to the end with a voice as dry as the Martini in the story. The writer makes skilful use of segments and segment headings to convey progression and create a sense of order, allowing the text within the segments the freedom of an unconventional storytelling style and a hard-nosed staccato tone. The piece is vibrant and propulsive, hurtling the reader towards the inevitable but somehow unexpected ending. This feels like a longer, deeper, more comprehensive story than should fit in 300 words – the type of compression that makes flash fiction so rewarding. The final three words offer both an invitation and a challenge – an ambivalence underscored by the deliciously dark and scornful undertones of the narrator’s voice.
Winner
Cassettes and Cigarette Smoke
The winner is a skilfully written historical flash fiction that is also a story for our times. Wonderful sensory and specific details create a strong sense of place and time: ‘They read on a rooftop above the Walaa koshary shop, surrounded by laundry lines, the adhan oozing from distant speakers. A haze of smoke between them – cigarettes and something older.’ The dark events that are happening at the same time that Ashraf is discovering more about the wider world are referred to with a light touch but make a heavy mark: ‘Ashraf asked no one. You don’t ask in Cairo when someone disappears’. I admired the way the importance of listening and being heard is underscored by Ashraf’s recording and playing back of neighbourhood noises, including protest chants. I didn’t know much (anything) about Egyptian politics in the 1980s, but this didn’t affect my appreciation of the story: the theme of oppression and resistance is universal. And so is the promise of hope extended in the haunting and beautiful ending.
S. A. Greene