WINNER, Summer 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY CHRIS TURNER-NEAL

Honey, don’t pull those straps. You’re not gonna get out, I promise you. Gonna tell you what’s going on, if you let me. But if it comes up again—never take a drink you didn’t see someone make. Anything could be in there.

Now, let’s catch you up. I’ve always been able to do a little . . . trick. I call it “pulling,” I don’t know if it has a real name. I don’t know if anyone else can do it. I can pull hurts out of people. They still remember what happened, but the sting is gone. It’s the difference between a wound and a scar. Here, think of something bad that happened. I know you don’t want to, but do it. I’m gonna touch your hand now.

Oh, that was nasty. I’m sorry that happened to you. But think about it again. Doesn’t hurt, right? Like it happened in a book. Just a fact, not a fear. That’s locked away somewhere in me, balled up tight like a seed. [continue reading…]

HONORABLE MENTION, Summer 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY H. WHEATON

The Red Sox will not win another series for three decades. In three minutes a man who lives down the hall from us will have been hit by a car on his way to work and will die in the hospital. You won’t hear until tomorrow. We won’t be at his funeral because we didn’t really know him. His daughter won’t attend for the same reason. The next United States presidential election will end in an unprecedented draw, and the House will pick a winner, and people will be mad about it and then they will move on. The world will not end within our lifetime, which secretly upsets people. People wouldn’t like the future if they saw it now. Not because it’s horrible, or because it contains a utopia they’ll never get to see, but because it just keeps moving forward, and nothing that has come before it will ever matter. Ringo will be the last Beatle to die. The bronze statue of Henry Winkler will be melted down within the century. Several European Nations will break apart. Texas will briefly secede. We’ll eat something instant and horrible tonight and in the morning my mouth will taste like styrofoam. New Hampshire will go without a governor for the longest period in a state’s history. I will not be present for the death of my mother. The repairman will take three weeks to fix a very simple heating problem in our building. The FBI will kill several Hondurans for very poorly explained reasons. It will turn out that Axe body spray is a key component for a very easy-to-construct improvised explosive. PBS will be defunded. It will rain tomorrow. I won’t be able to [continue reading…]

HONORABLE MENTION, Summer 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY CRISTINA BRYAN

On a cool, cloudy afternoon Mr. Bechtold and I met at the Children’s 1935 Flood Memorial in Wilkey, West Virginia. At the time I was working on my master’s thesis in Folklore, studying some of that state’s folk tales. I was specifically interested in the ghost stories that so often evolve in a community after a local tragedy. West Virginia is full of old stories about train wrecks, the murder of girls by their faithless young bridegrooms, and so on, many of these tales based in truth.

What about when a flood from a dam break wiped out 50 percent of the people in a small town, including (most memorably) all the children at a famous old boarding school? How could there not be hauntings where the school had stood? I thought there had to have been hints of this—at least mysterious sounds, a sense people have had of being watched—in later years. I simply hadn’t run across mention of any yet.

I’d started by putting a print ad in the Summers County Times-Recorder and two other papers asking for people with uncanny stories about the aftermath of the flood to get in touch. This is what had happened: the big Tugstone River Dam had burst suddenly one October morning, causing vast, almost biblical-level flooding throughout the deep valley. Wilkey was one of several towns that was practically washed away. The tragic aspect that most people tend to remember about the town is the destruction of the venerable Pierpont Academy. The town was eventually rebuilt, and on the site of the old boarding school they created a lovely park with a big memorial.

The memorial to the schoolchildren is a tall, thick slab of West Virginia granite, black in color, with 48 victims’ names inscribed in slanty letters down its front. While I think it’s handsome in a stark way, I secretly think it’s in poor taste that it doubles as a fountain. A little wall of water burps up about four inches high along the memorial’s top and flows down like a shiny sheet over the drowned people’s names.

I waited four weeks for any responses to my newspaper ad. Finally I got my only one—a message from someone called David Bechtold, who said he was a teacher in Wilkey and knew some interesting things about the flood. We arranged a meeting the following week at the monument in the town park.

Mr. Bechtold was already there when I arrived. We sat on wooden benches facing the black monolith and its roll call of the drowned. [continue reading…]