WINNER, 2021
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY MONA SUSAN POWER
You have no one to blame but yourself. But you’ve been surviving on graduate student wages, convinced you’ll toil in obscurity forever. You’re not a star in the Anthropology Department. Frankly, there isn’t room for another star. Certainly not for the first Native American woman ever admitted to this famous university’s prestigious program.
You like to think you honor your ancestors—one wall of your studio apartment is covered with photographs of them, radiating from the central portrait of your great-grandfather and his eternal stare. You’re convinced he’s watching you, perhaps proud of you as you bend over your reading. One night when you treat yourself to a tumbler of quality bourbon—a gift from Dr. Mason, the Department Chair who often says that he “believes in you”—a blur of movement from the wall of photos catches your eye. You stand up to investigate, peering into faces of men and women long dead, the ones responsible for your being here. Your great-grandfather sits tall, his posture grand but at ease. Unlike you, he is comfortable in his skin. A blanket drapes over one arm and hand, and he holds a war club in the other. You know he would kill to protect you. He kept your band together in hard times. He maintained spiritual practices that existed before the time of Jesus. His stare makes you uneasy, so you glance away for a second. There it is again, the blur of movement. Your ancestors are restless.
* * *
You’ve had too much to drink at the Departmental Christmas party. You begin telling stories. How your parents and younger brother, Martin, were killed on a foggy night in Wisconsin while headed to Oneida for the annual powwow. Truck driver fell asleep and drifted across the median, slamming head on into your family’s car. State troopers forbade you from viewing their bodies, saying the carnage would be too much. And you understood what they meant after Martin visited you in a dream the next night, pushing his tortoise-shell glasses up the bridge of his nose in that gesture you found endearing—such a solemn nine-year-old—and his face slid away, revealing glistening bone. You were about to crumple in horror when his face came back, and he mouthed the word, “Sorry,” like it was his fault he was dead. [continue reading…]
HONORABLE MENTION, 2021 The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY SCOTT DUNCAN
The Kid shifted in bed. A great weight had been lifted from him, raising him upon a pedestal and exposing him to air and light. Or maybe someone just took off his blanket.
“Wake up, cabrón.” El Viejo again.
“No way, man, let me sleep!”
“Hey, you can’t squat here. Get your lazy white ass up!”
The Kid sat up and scratched his arm. “White ass?”
He looked down. Where his arm should have been, there was something like a fish, covered in yellowish fur. It looked like the arm of a boss, a cop, a rich guy, a president, or some redneck who calls everyone snowflake. It was the arm of a WASP, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
HONORABLE MENTION, 2021
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY MARIE RAVEN
In my country, we live with dragons. Our region is remote and the way dangerous, but travelers, perhaps having heard a rook in a distant land, come to seek the truth in the rumor.
Every legend of a dragon is the tragedy of an adventurer. One narrow path winds up our mountain, from soft moss in the blue-green forest to hard stone beyond the last stunted trees. There, provisions spoil and nightmares invade sleep.
They’ve heard of the fiery breath and diamond scales of a dragon who has spent a thousand lifetimes stealing precious things. Those stories don’t explain that this is the dragon of Hate, or that the only thing you take from a dragon’s hoard is what the hoard takes from you. Rumors are never quite truth.
There is a dragon on the mountain, but so too are there dragons throughout the journey to get there. A forest along the way is so laden with songbirds they look like fruit ready to drop from the trees. Here is the place of the hoard of Intentions, and seekers return broken by the drag of things left unfinished in their lives. There is another dragon to the south who hoards Dreams. No one returns from going that way at all. [continue reading…]
One of my favorite Screw Turn Flash Fiction Pieces . . .
Is Tongues, by the Irish writer Emma Murtagh. I just find it to be one of the most chilling sudden pieces we’ve ever published. Have a read . . . and don’t forget that submissions to the current Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition are due before the clock strikes 12 at the end of January 31.
Volume II of our print anthology, “21st Century Ghost Stories,” has just been published. It contains all of our Summer 2018 to Summer 2021 winning and honorable mention stories from The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award contest and The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition—30 fine supernatural short stories in all!
