by Editor
on June 6, 2022
A New Summer Flash Fiction Contest
Until now, we’ve run The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition only once a year, in the dead of winter. We’ve accepted submissions from December through January, with the winner and honorable mentions announced and published on Valentine’s Day.
But starting right now, with our new Summer Flash Contest, we’re doing it twice a year. Same guidelines, same word length . . . with a July 15 deadline and winning pieces presented to the world on July 31, just before the August 1 opening of our Fall Supernatural Fiction Award competition for full-length short stories.
The new Flash event now gives us an uncanny-story contest for each season of the year—flash fiction in the winter and summer, and full-length stories in the fall and spring.
If you like flash fiction—and particularly if you like to write flash fiction—the guidelines are only a click away.
Cheers —— The Editor
by Editor
on June 1, 2022
Now Published!
Treanor Wooten Baring, of Houston, Texas, won the spring 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award contest for her story, “The Unseen.”
Honorable mentions were awarded to Goldie Goldbloom for “The Hours” and Bradford Gyori for “Docking The Blue Impossible.” Read all three winning pieces here.
Also, be aware—and beware—we begin accepting submissions for our first-ever summer Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition on June 6. Cheers — The Editor
by Editor
on February 14, 2022
Our Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition Winners Are Posted Below
. . . And Our Full-Length Story Contest Opens
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition-winning story for winter 2022 is “Heart Full Of Crows,” by Arthur Pike. To read it, just scroll down this page. Our honorable mention winners are Haley Kennedy, of northern California, for her story, “Birthday Cake,” and Mona Susan Power, of Minneapolis, for “War Bundle.” Susan Power has been here before: Her story, “Straw Dogs,” took the top prize in the 2021 Screw Turn Flash contest. Congratulations to all three of our flash fiction winners—and many thanks to our contest judge, Tara Lynn Masih.
Twice each year, The Screw Turn contest awards publication and cash prizes for excellence in supernatural fiction of between 250 and 1,000 words. For your reading enjoyment, all three stories are posted below, and will soon be available on the Screw Turn Story Page.
Our summer 2022 Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition opens in early June. If you’re a writer who is interested in entering, keep an eye on this website for announcements.
Meanwhile, The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, our contest for full-length supernatural short stories of up to 10,000 words, opens for will be open for submissions as of February 15, with a deadline of April 30. If you’re a writer of supernatural fiction, have a look at our competition guidelines.
by Editor
on February 13, 2022
WINNER, WINTER 2022
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY ARTHUR PIKE
My Daddy had what you call a heart full of crows. He’d sit outside our rented cabin of an afternoon with his pistol, plinking at birds, missing wide most times, until finally he’d take out the sun and that’d be the day.
This sitting out shooting would attract the attention of the management which you’d think my Daddy would be adverse to after going to such lengths to sweep over his tracks, throw his implements in rivers, wipe clean all he touched, stand ever ready with a new name for the registry.
It was a regular place, the management said, running with regular tenants. Lay down your arms, the management said. But my Daddy was the kind of man whose actions persuade. Turns out he’d tapped into some vein of deep desire running just under the skin of that place. Before long, most of the rest of the regulars were out in the afternoon, peppering away.
It would have been a good time to stay inside but I was growing, growing hard, a foot or two a day. I launched up to the ceiling then curled back in on myself like some ram’s horn, doubling, tripling up. All this growth was the reason my Daddy had to cut me down to size.
He used whatever came to hand—slap to the face, knuckle to the chin, knee to the back on the cold, hard floor. This was the daily round, mine to take until I got my size. But the time did come quick enough to wrest myself back from him. One afternoon of my seventeenth year, I lifted that gun out of his hand, woke him from his sleep, and made my good-byes. [continue reading…]
