FFF Competition Twenty-One – Judge’s Report by Charles Prelle
22nd May 2024
What a pleasure it’s been for me to judge this competition for the third time, and I’d like to say a huge thank you to Ian Rushton for allowing me to do so. Free Flash Fiction is a wonderful competition and Ian is its beating heart. I’d also like to say congratulations to all fifteen writers on the long-list. As always, the work was excellent and narrowing things down to a shortlist was a difficult task. It’s a huge privilege to be trusted with someone else’s work and I’ve done my best to honour that trust. Being a judge or a reader for any writing competition or lit mag is a subjective exercise and another person may have had a completely different view such was the strength of the writing on display.
So on to the shortlist!
The first shortlisted story, Radio Free Europe is set in a shadowy authoritarian world where the protagonist moves through dark places both literal and figurative. The loss of a loved one to the dark forces surrounding them feels palpable as danger lurks around every corner “fast as a sniper’s bullet”. The use of imagery builds a sense of grief and foreboding but also of undying hope as the protagonist reaches out into the darkness for someone to connect with.
The next shortlisted piece Land Girl tells the story of a young girl who loses her new husband to war and then the child they made together. I loved the little details in the piece that helped build a picture of her life, from her hastily arranged wedding to being “war-widowed before she has become accustomed to writing her new name” we get a view into who she is and where she comes from. She looks for reasons to keep going, taking a job on a farm that tests her further until an unexpected moment of connection allows her to finally start letting go.
The final shortlisted story Suffusion of Colour tells the story of an artist and her ballerina lover through the tender hues and shades of their lives. Set in the early 1900s in England and France, this is a broad sweep of a tale told in just 300 words. The imagery in the piece is so vividly told and its pallet so rich one can count each brush stroke, following the couple through their love and eventual parting. It’s a gorgeous tale of love and letting go.
And we now move to the highly commended pieces, the first of which A Kintsugi Heart is a powerful piece about finding redemption. The story moves through the different stages of heartbreak the narrator goes through, told in moving language as she likens herself to the severity of shards of glass or the fragility of an egg before finally pulling the pieces of herself back together to become something stronger and more beautiful.
My next highly commended story is Bees Fly. This a gorgeous story about the final moments in the life of the narrator’s grandfather. The writer adeptly captures the eeriness of those final hours, the way time slows down “neither moving nor standing still” as everyone waits for the inevitable. The narrator reflects on the little moments in their relationship, time spent together that forged their bond. The narrator also ruminates on the nature of life and death, how all things must pass. This is a wonderful story that tugs at the heartstrings.
That just leaves the winner. Coming Home From the Mill At Least Is Certain tells the story of a soldier returning from war and adjusting to life after such a traumatic event. The language here is wonderfully sensorial, from the coldness the soldier feels in the hand of the woman he loves as he “brought her the shiver of trenches” to the “machine gun clatter of the factory floor” that he works on, every image can be felt viscerally. The writer uses parlance to identify place and immerse the reader into the world the soldier inhabits, a broken world where the “lucky ones”, the “brothers, sons and lovers who lived” are left to pick up the pieces and find a way to move on. This is a gorgeously written and crafted piece that I came back to time and again and a worthy winner.
Charles Prelle