by Editor
on February 13, 2025
. . . 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…]
by Editor
on February 1, 2025
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
. . . is now CLOSED to submissions.
We’ll be announcing and publishing our winner and honorable mentions on or before February 14. But that’s not the end of opportunities for writers to compete, because The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, for full-length short stories, opens to submissions on February 15. The deadline is April 30, with winners announced on June 1. You can read more about it here.
Don’t forget to stop back in a couple of weeks to read our top three flash-fiction pieces!
by Editor
on December 1, 2024
Our Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
Got a short-short story—under 1,000 words—on a supernatural or magic realism theme that you’re ready to start submitting to publications? Or maybe you’ve got one rattling around in your brain that you’ve been thinking about committing to paper, or to a computer screen?
Well, our Winter contest for flash fiction—AKA sudden, or brief, or short-short fiction—is now open to submissions. If you’d like to have a look at our guidelines, you can access them here.
Happy holiday season — The Editor
by Editor
on November 11, 2024
Now Available: Volume III
Copies of 21st Century Ghost Stories—Volume III, are now available for purchase directly from our printer. The 433 page trade paperback book, the latest collection in our print anthology series, contains all 39 winning and honorable mention stories published online between summer 2021 and summer 2024 in our two biannual Ghost Story Awards competitions. Those competitions are The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, for full-length supernatural or magic realist short stories between 1,500 and 10,000 words, and The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition, for supernatural or magic realist flash pieces of 1,000 or fewer words.
You can order your copy from the Wyrd Harvest Press page on the the printer’s website. Happy reading!
