Flash! It’s fiction.

We’ve finally gotten the word, and now it’s time to spread it. We’ve gone through all the entries in SN&R’s Flash Fiction Contest and picked our top choices.

We received 112 entries in the contest. They came from all over our circulation area and ranged from meditations to fantasies, murder mysteries to romances, and more than a few just plain gross-out anecdotes. From this pool of stories, a panel of SN&R editorial staffers selected 10 finalists. All judging was anonymous; judges were asked to rank stories numerically, and then the scores were averaged to select the 10 with the highest ranking.

The first-, second- and third-place winners were selected from the finalists by an outside judge, distinguished local writer Jay Feldman [see the sidebar “Here comes the judge”]. Feldman had no constraints on the standards by which he selected the winners, and, like the preliminary panel, he also judged “blind”—that is, the copies of the stories he saw did not have names attached.

The top three winners (congratulations!) will receive a prize—a gift certificate to a local bookstore—and an award certificate; finalists will receive an award certificate.

So, here they are: the best in short-short fiction from our readers.

Judge Jay Feldman’s comments on the winners:
Judging writing is, of course, largely subjective. Certain elements—character, plot, conflict, pacing, suspense—are common to all good writing, but beyond that, what any given reader (a contest judge included) prefers ultimately boils down to individual taste. So, my choices here really reflect my own predilections; another judge may very well have chosen otherwise. That said, here are the winners.

First place

Second place

Third place

Finalists