FIRST ANNUAL MYSTERY FLASH FICTION CONTEST RESULTS!

Thank you so much for your patience writers!

At long last, we would like to announce the winners of the First Annual Mystery Flash Fiction contest! Winners will be notified directly through email and will be given comments from Mark and I regarding your story!

A special thank you goes out to all the writers who submitted. It takes time and courage to submit your work and this did not go unnoticed or appreciated! We will also send you comments via email about your stories as well.

PRIZES:

HONOURABLE MENTION

“Fishing”

Name: Anthony Henry Joseph Maria
Title: Fishing
Word Count: 190

There wasn’t much I knew about her.
“That’s an interesting concept,” she said smiling, then played with her hair brooding.
If I could have stopped time in that instant, said something about her father, maybe things wouldn’t have gone the way they did. But I didn’t.
“Yeah,” I said touching her shapely shoulder. “It’s nothing original really. I mean it’s certainly been done before. It’s pretty simple, and we pay cash.”
She looked troubled, but I could tell it was only a matter of time. She would give in.
“You’re so pretty,” I said definitively. “You could be a star someday. You have the look. Have to start somewhere though, right?’
She looked at me searching.
“I could really use the money. I’ve been auditioning a lot, but haven’t booked anything in a while.”
Her eyes were green, and sparkled in the light of the blistering sun.
“It’s only a matter of time,” I replied. “So are we going to do this?”
I smiled at her. She stamped her foot on the pavement, her arms folded, and her head bobbing slightly. She really was beautiful. But that didn’t really matter. Not anymore.

PRIZE: A set of the coolest bookplates you ever did see.

THIRD PLACE

“This Floating World”

Name: Terry Ann Carter
Title “This Floating World”
Word Count: 84 words

Tokugawa period. Japan. This floating world of pleasures. This world of samurai warriors, geishas, poets, prostitutes. As a ukiyo-e artist I am intent on my next wood block print. A death mask.

After some sexual adventures I will prepare a tea ceremony for my sensei. The exact proportion of poison in the tea bowl.

I will use a chashaku carved from a single piece of bamboo.

My chasen will whisk the potion into the raku bowl.

Must hurry. The boating party is about to depart.

PRIZE: A set of writing journals.

SECOND PLACE

“Missing”

Name: Karen Rockwell
Title: Missing
Word Count: 77

Missing

“I don’t know,” she said, and she meant it. Naked oblivion spilled from her thin, wind-chapped lips, filled up her wide near-tears eyes, sprang from her panicked expression, from her flushed ruddy skin, like a rash of question marks, as she offered up the dog-eared wallet photo of a toothless grinning child.

The constable sighed as she handed the photo back to the child’s mother.

“We will do our very best,” she said through a forced smile.

PRIZE: A copy of Poetry On Demand Volume 1 & 2, and a e-version of Mark Bacon’s Cops, Crooks & Other Stories in 100 Words

FIRST PLACE

“Clean Dust”

Name: Eva Antonel
Title: Clean Dust
Word Count:199

“I was terrified I’d fall to my death if I got too close to the edge.”
Her eyes move away from the third storey balcony we were looking at.
“What else do you remember?”
“The tall, narrow bathroom window and how you could see into the neihbour’s bedroom if the light was just right.”
“I never noticed that,” she says, as we make our way into the courtyard of the tenement we left forty years ago. “And here, this doorway leads to the cellar where we stored the root vegetables over the winter.”
“And the coal,” I say.
“Yes, the man with the horse-drawn wagon dumped it next to the cellar windows and the men shoveled it in.”
“I was too young; I just remember the warmth of the stove in the corner of the room.”
“That’s all a child needs to remember,” she says.
“Not the hushed voices talking about the girl they found hanging there?”
She sits on the nearby bench and looks past me at the dormers of the attic.
“Do you remember grandmother hanging the laundry up there?”
“Yes,” I say, “the air smelled like clean dust. Just like father the morning he went away.”

PRIZE: A copy of Trouble is My Business by Raymond Chandler, a copy of The Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction edited by Tara L. Masih, and an e-version of Mark Bacon’s Cops, Crooks & Other Stories in 100 Words.