Competition Twenty-Six Winning Flash Fiction: Yes, Pumpernickel Makes a Wonderful Wedding Present by Chris Cottom

Planning

Combine with earth-mother earrings, vegan-friendly clogs, and a plus-sized smock dress that’ll make the spray-tanned bride worry she’s not the only one knocked up by your ex’s not-so-legendary todger.

Experiment

Go off-piste with your ingredients, like your ex did with that uber-fit ski instructor, leaving you to picnic solo on Uckermark apple bread and mini bottles of Muller Thurgau. As an alternative to cane sugar, use the Black Forest honey you drizzled around his drawer of tighty-whities. For extra bite, dust your pumpernickel with a fun-pack of Peach Reaper chilli powder.

Serving

Don’t leave your loaf on the table that’s groaning with handmade love spoons and Lakeland salad bowls, a little glass Bambi and horn-tooting huntsman. You’re here to show you won’t be defined by eight wasted years with a spineless mummy’s boy who spent his days playing Dungeons and Dragons while you climbed the career ladder at Primark on Peckham High Road.

Delivery

So wear your loaf low and, thirty seconds into your ex’s cringy speech, put your hand to your belly and scream, ‘It’s coming!’ Then birth your pumpernickel onto the sprung dance floor, as messily as possible, as messy as the Monday you didn’t make assistant manager on men’s accessories, got home to last night’s saucepans still in the sink, and went full donner and blitzen so loudly that Mrs Downstairs called the bizzies.

More

If your ex is the recidivist love-rat he appears to be, you won’t be alone. Seek out that sad girl with her sourdough, that weeping redhead with her rustic cob. Start an artisan bakery together, the Self-Raising Sisterhood, crafting wedding gifts with a difference. Let the world know that revenge, Peckham-style, is pumpernickel shaped.

Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His work’s been published in 50-Word Stories, 100 Word Story, Eastern Iowa Review, Flash 500, Flash Frontier, Free Flash Fiction, NFFD NZ, NFFD UK, Oxford Flash Fiction, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, The Phare, and other fine places. In the early 1970s he lived next door to JRR Tolkien.

@chriscottom.bsky.social

chriscottom.wixsite.com

Photo – Freepik.com