WINNER, Winter 2025
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY KYLE PLACET

The last time I saw my sister was at a family dinner where she was showing off her new boyfriend. I remembered thinking that this was the first guy she had brought around who actually seemed to fit her. She seemed happy.

She went missing in the spring. The first real rain to break the drought had come that winter, which led to a wave of wildflowers bursting from the ground, painting the hills like pastels. She vanished with the changing season and the flowers continued to bloom like nothing had happened.

I had a dream that she wandered into the hills to enjoy their beauty and lost all sense of time and of self and forgot about her home and her life and couldn’t come back. Standing at the foot of the hills, I watched her go, calling her name. But she ignored me and kept ascending until she was out of sight.

It hit everybody hard. The boyfriend especially. The poor guy was the number one suspect in her disappearance, too. How can you properly mourn someone when you’re being blamed for what happened to them? My mother never really stopped thinking he had something to do with it.

She was declared legally dead a little over a year later. For a while it still remained hard not to think that one day she would just wander on home and everything would be all right again, simple as that. I finally understood that wasn’t going to happen.

I felt lost. Life going forward did not seem to make sense. I would never even get to know why.

I became friends with the boyfriend, out of mutual grief. We helped each other through our loss. Told each other memories of her and made it seem like she wasn’t fully gone. We started dating for a bit but that didn’t last. We could just never feel comfortable together.

He showed me a place that had been special to her. A short hike through the woods and you found yourself at an abandoned railroad station. All that remained was a wooden platform, a small boarded-up ticket office, and a bench. You could hardly see the tracks for all the overgrown greenery. She had found it and had loved its natural beauty and its melancholic serenity. It was where she went when she was stressed and wanted to get away from the world. Now it was where he went to try to feel close to her. [continue reading…]

HONORABLE MENTION, Winter 2025
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY MICHAEL HAIDEN

The king was snoring. He lay on his back, a thin stream of saliva running down his cheek—which was marked by a white scar where a blade had cut him many years ago—his breath coming in uneven rasps. He slept alone in his chamber. After he returned to the castle that morning, the queen had welcomed him in the courtyard and had then gone to sit by herself in the garden. The autumn breeze shook her but still she did not rise to follow him inside. Under a cloudy sky, she stared at the trees the king had planted for her fifteen years ago, on the day they were married.

What a man he’d been back then, we whispered. How strong, how fierce.

And what was he now, we asked?

Old. Defeated.

The queen squirmed in her seat.

We left her alone and returned to the sleeping king. His chest rose and fell with his heavy breaths. We knocked on his chamber door. He groaned, raised his head, dropped it on the pillow. We knocked again. This time he got up but when he opened the door he didn’t see us.

The king cursed and went back to bed.

He was not yet forty but his hair had started to turn gray. It had happened suddenly after his last battle, the one he lost. Only two months ago, he left the castle with five thousand men and the conviction that he’d return as a conqueror, the way he’d done his whole reign.

But this morning, he’d returned with only five hundred men. The rest had fallen—struck down by swords and axes, trampled under horses. Their broken bodies were still scattered across the field of his defeat. The king had left them behind after signing his surrender. [continue reading…]

. . . I’m Tired Of The Deadly Car Crashes

HONORABLE MENTION, Winter 2025
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY H. WHEATON

It was through an app, like most things nowadays. We had similar tastes, she lived close, it was a good fit. The drive there was fine. Normal. Unremarkable. I’d had thousands of drives like it before.

It was a good date, my first in a while. She had a wide smile and an easy laugh. We talked about movies and music and our jobs, and at the end set a time for a second date the next Wednesday.

The drive back was normal, for a bit. Then, on the roundabout below the highway, I saw a Toyota sedan smashed perpendicular into the traffic barrier. Cars had slowed and stopped around it. I drove around and continued on my way, a little perturbed but not enough to dull my good mood.

That next Wednesday, as I was driving back from work to get ready for our date, it was a rolled Honda minivan on the side of the highway.

Halfway through the second date I’d already put it out of my mind. It was an enchanting night. She shared a long-winded but consistently amusing anecdote about her mother, and I laughed at the points where it was appropriate to laugh, and we were both beaming by the end of the meal and agreed to rendezvous back at her apartment. We had driven separately, so we parted briefly. I left a little later than she did after spending a few minutes checking myself in the car mirror and making sure my breath didn’t smell of the scallops I had dined on.

At the intersection a block from her house a red Mazda blasted through a red straight into the side of a cop car. The hood crumpled. Metal tore like paper. [continue reading…]