Winners & Commended
First: Moon landing – Margaret Moores
Second: Wayfinding – Annabel Wilson
Third: Revelations – Annette Edwards-Hill
Highly Commended: Shell game – PK Granger
Highly Commended: Uncle – Linda Collins
Short List
Because / Some days – Annabel Wilson
Shotgun – Mary Francis
The kina girl – June Pitman-Hayes
The rocky shore – Janis Freegard
Wishful thinking – Amber O’Sullivan
Long List
All hung out: Washing Lines of my Life – Deb Jowitt
Eel – Lou Annabell
Gymkhana meets Madonna – Sue Barker
Lines – Rebecca Ball
Miss Katherine Mansfield dreams of Menton and the many benefits of Heliotherapy – Alex Reece Abbott
No. 6 and No. 8 – Benjamin Jardine
Now with 40% less carbs– Liz Breslin
Once upon a time in West Auckland– Hayden Pyke
Parietal eye– Janis Freegard
Rural bliss – Sue Barker
Talking electricity, my name – Michael Harlow
The harvest – Susan Wardell
The resurrectionist’s apprentice – Atom Gush
Took the dog – Visited the sea – Madeleine Child
Woman of letters – Barbara Strang
Features:
Interview: Margaret Moores, 2023 NFFD winner
NFFD 2023: Festival of Flash
NFFD 2023: Events around Aotearoa
NFFD 2023: Judges share new work
Micro Madness 2023: Long List
FIRST PLACE
Moon Landing
Margaret Moores, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Auckland Regional Prize
On a night during lockdown when the moon was so bright that I kept waking thinking it was dawn, a silver Swiss ball rolled down my driveway and into a flax bush under the karaka tree. For the next few mornings, I pushed it back up to the street, but by evening it had always returned to the flax. Eventually, it became part of the garden. At first, I thought of it as a pool of shimmering light, but with time, it seemed more like a giant, shadowy face with flax stalks for hair.
After a tiresome day in which all the heads in my Zoom meetings kept flaring against virtual backgrounds as if everyone had secretly left Earth for another planet, I noticed the ball glimmering in the darkness when I took out the bins. Its underside was blotched with mould and its wide, pale face appeared to be gazing up the driveway as if it were planning how to get back to the street. I carried it to the gate and surrendered it to the wind. For the rest of that week, I watched the moon waxing from a crescent of soft light into a luminous, pockmarked sphere.
I was sixteen when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I had an after-school job in the Public Library, and we had the radio on while we carded returns. Everything seemed in slow motion that afternoon – as if the building had lost all gravity and we were floating weightless between the shelves while we slotted books into their places. When I watched him climbing down the ladder through gaps in the static on TV that night, I had thought of a ball bouncing slowly across a stony field with nobody to stop it soaring up into the dark.
SECOND PLACE
Wayfinding
Annabel Wilson, Ohinehou Lyttelton
Canterbury Regional Prize
Through a hole in the wall at Yummy Jianbing on a cool Queen St evening, we watch an expert flick of wrist and spoon swirl batter like a hieroglyph on the hotplate. We’re handed our pancakes, smooth and thin as bat wings. That’s poetry, you reckon. Shifting to the far end of the park bench in Aotea Square you say I can’t sit near you because my body’s full of static. Tonight’s all frequency, vibration. The buses have stopped running so we’ll wander down to the docks, flow with the ghosts of Wai Horotiu to those Tidal Stepsthey built for the America’s Cup. Water always finds its way. There are ancient networks of streams flowing under all our cities, you say. This is the rohe of Horotiu, the taniwha. Lying on concrete, we speak of 100-year-old eels spawned in the Pacific’s trenches, drifting with the currents, a freshwater adolescence, then swimming the darkness beneath these streets to return, finally, to open seas. Let’s look for meteors or satellites, or something else, cool and silver, flying
THIRD PLACE
Revelations
Annette Edwards-Hill, Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington
Wellington Regional Prize
The year I turned eight, it rained for three days. The river rose towards the stop bank on the other side of the farm. Sheep huddled under the macrocarpa. My mother stood for a long time watching the rain. When she finally turned away from the window she went to the telephone and rang Dial-a-Prayer.
She held the phone out and we listened to the mumbled recording. I looked out on a landscape of water as the voice told me the earth had passed away and there was no longer any sea.
My mother put the phone back on the hook. Revelations she said. It’s the end of the world.
It stopped raining that day and the river retreated back to the valley. Barefooted I walked the dog, the grassy plains now lakes. I felt the grass at the bottom of deep puddles curl through my toes.
Now the flooding is biblical. My mother rings and says the chickens have gone back to bed for the day and she might too. She can’t flush the toilet. The power is off. She’s not worried. She moved away from the river years ago.
Then the phone line goes down and there is silence for five days. On the television there are images of homes swept away and bridges broken. I imagine her in her house on the hillside, turning away from the window and the rain as she reads her bible.
When my mother finally rings she says it’s stopped raining, the power is on and the chickens are dry. I visit her that month and we drive to the gate of the old farm and look for the house but there is only the dirt left behind by the river, the hot sun baking it into craters.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Shell game
P K Granger, Ōtautahi Christchurch
My mum had a shell suit. One of those dreadful 90s coloured outfits that older Americans wear on package holidays that come in pairs, so you can’t shake the other person no matter how hard you try. One of those suits worn by Tony Soprano’s henchmen.
Mum’s shell suit was panelled aqua and white and pink, which she wore zipped right up. I don’t know where the twin of that suit was, perhaps being worn by a New Jersey mobster.
Made of a flammable nylon outer, a cotton inner, with a comfortable elasticated waist, Mum’s shell suit swished when she walked. No need to dry-clean, just pop it in the top loader. Quick line dry. Do not iron. Made in China.
Do blood stains come out? You know, if you’re a New Jersey hitman. Or do you ditch the shell suit and get a new one? What if you only got blood on say the jacket, do you keep the pants?
What about cancer, does that come out in the wash?
When I got a flash new job, Mum flew in from Oz in that aqua and white and pink shell suit. My workmates thought she looked cool. I was embarrassed. I didn’t spend a lot of time with her, just busy I guess. She remarked on it as we said our airport goodbyes. Someone else’s mum overhearing gave me a look.
My mum died the next year. We took her clothes, still smelling of Arpège, to the local charity shop. As my sister and I left town we drove past, and there was Mum’s aqua and white and pink shell suit hanging on a $3.00 rack inside the door. My insides twisted. I ran inside and snatched it back, peeling rubber as we drove off like New Jersey mobsters.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Uncle
Linda Collins, Ōtepoti Dunedin
Otago Regional Prize
Dining table at 6pm for the evening news on TV. Me, Grandma, and Uncle in our unit. Fish cooked in milk. Worn, ivory-handled fish knives. A saggy lace tablecloth. After dinner, Uncle goes to his bedroom and from his window throws firecrackers at fighting cats and drunks. Gunpowder smoke swirls down the hallway. This often happens. Later, Uncle goes to his weekly ‘Rozzie meeting’, as Grandma calls it. I am only twelve but when I ask about Rozzies, Uncle tilts his head thoughtfully (being Aquarius) and says he is a grand master in a secret Rosicrucian brotherhood who believe in a universal reformation of mankind.
Bald uncle, grand master of the universe! Daytime, works for the education ministry, a ‘surveyor’. At night, ‘astronomist’. Measures distances, how wide does the road need to be? How far to that star?
Nothing about a secret sisterhood.
Grandma stitches mysterious priest-like robes for his grand mastery. As she pulls the needle in and out, she tells me she misses the farm, her late husband who was good with cows, her other son who married a floozie.
Nothing about Daughter.
Some nights before dawn, a nylon raincoat rustles past my door, Uncle off to make Observations from his telescope in its box hidden among runner beans. He is only angry once, when Grandma tells him about Mouse living in my bedroom. Uncle says it will chew the wiring of his ham radio. The radio is by my bed and I have draped Grandma’s fur stole with a fox head over it. I cry when I see Mouse dead in the trap. Fox cries. Uncle does not cry, mutters this is the way of the world and someone had to take you in when your mum left. I make my own Observations. But, ham?
SHORT LIST
Because / Some days
Annabel Wilson, Ōtautahi Christchurch
Because some days you’re catching tadpoles with your brother on Christmas Eve in the pond at the edge of the subdivision, with a big net. Because you want to get your niece and nephew something original and living for Christmas.
Because some days you’re off coffee. Some days you’re on the mend. Some days you’re on a bender and you’ll be up for days and days because some days you’re the flame, yearning.
There has been a miscommunication.
Don’t leave anything in the room.
Turn on Out of Office Auto-reply.
Because you can’t turn this into myth. Because of the way he stood with his arms out a little bit. Because of how he started his sentences with words like ‘Now…’ like he was someone much older.
Because now you get your advice from listicles and google searches and platitudes like On your worst day, wear your best outfit; Grief is work. Your brother passes the net. You swoop and swoop, hoping for a flash of movement, a glimpse of tiny see-through wriggling things with eyes and tails and barely formed legs, “indicator species” suggesting a healthy ecosystem. At dusk these past few nights, you’ve heard frogs, so you know they’re here. Pass the net back. Stand and listen in the dark.
Shotgun
Mary Francis, Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington
“Back home we call them ‘shotguns’,” he said, standing on the street in Wellington where narrow houses sit an arm’s length apart. The streetlights wove the shadows of tī kōuka fronds against wooden walls. The local ruru called to its mate, a mournful plea to return to the nest.
“Everything’s guns with you people,” I said. The front door of the cottage, framed panels of stained glass, liquid-looking red and gold, back-lit by a family’s Friday night. I’d stopped to look because it was so beautiful. “Riding shotgun. Shotgun weddings.”
“The hallway runs front to back,” he said, “to create a breeze. So if you open the doors you can shoot straight through the house.”
“They’re workman’s cottages,” I corrected him. Built a hundred years ago, one storey high, one room wide, close to the railway and the port. A little patch of garden out the back. Just enough space for a man, alone, stopping for a few years to make a living, not a life. But the city’s changed and the cottages have been renovated and now they can fit in a mum, dad and kid, living the Kiwi dream. “They’re worth over a million.”
“That’s crazy,” he said. He told me that night he’d bought his ticket back to America. His working visa was expiring. He wanted to go home. “C’mon, it’s late.”
But I stood longer to look at the glow behind the glass.
The kina girl
June Pitman-Hayes, Whangārei
Northland Regional Prize
Sunrise projected a soft beam of light onto the paua-shelled eyes of the fearsome figure that sat at the top of the carved pou inside the wharenui.
Rising from her mattress, the girl walked forward, placed her hands upon the pou, and raised her eyes to meet the gaze of her tūpuna.
Light bouncing off the shell made the figure’s eyes appear alive somehow. The girl shivered a little before leaning in to press her forehead and nose against it. The energetic flow felt as if an invisible cord existed between them. Her tūpuna were bestowing their blessings of protection and abundance upon her, infusing her with deepest warmth. Reciting karakia, the girl carefully acknowledged all the gifts she’d received, then turned and made her way to the front door and out into the fresh morning air.
From beneath the wooden form where her kuia and kaumātua usually sat, she retrieved the flax kete filled with her belongings that she’d covered with sugar bags and stashed there the night before. She changed quickly into her kai gathering clothes (board-shorts, long-sleeved tee shirt, Swandri, divers knife) then in the half-light, headed off along the familiar track to the beach.
At the water’s edge, the girl wound her hair up into a topknot, securing it with a whalebone heru. Her brother, the one their elders had nick-named ‘Kina Boy’, had carved and presented the comb to her the first time they’d gone kai gathering together.
“This heru has special powers like mine, sis. It’ll keep you safe,” he’d said. Trouble is, the last time they’d gone out he hadn’t been wearing his.
Tightening her grip on the sugar bags, she shouted, “I’m the ‘Kina Girl’ now, bro!” then waded out into the sea.
The rocky shore
Janis Freegard, Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington
Rain pelted the windows. The sea was darker than usual, almost black. Jess had bought the cottage – with its outrageous mortgage that kept her awake at night – because of the sea. She could see it from her little sunroom, just big enough for a coffee table and an armchair. I could sit here and watch the sea, she’d thought when the estate agent showed her round. And so she did, every morning with her coffee and toast and every night after work. She’d taken on extra shifts driving buses at the weekends, to make the fortnightly payments. It meant she was always exhausted, but Jess had her view and it was worth it. Different every day. Better than Netflix.
The rain eased and the sun struggled through the clouds. Something was out there in the churning waves. A seal maybe? A paua diver? Too rough, she would’ve thought. Could someone have got into trouble, be stuck out there? Jess grabbed her binoculars from the windowsill. She could make out what might be long strands of seaweed. But they appeared to be attached to a head. A body. Swimming, in this weather?
As she watched, the figure hauled itself on to a rock. Jess must’ve been seeing things. It definitely looked like a woman – she had breasts. But she also had a tail. The sort that might belong on a kingfish, but shimmering all the colours of the rainbow when the sun struck it. It was mesmerising.
Was that music she could hear? Jess felt herself moving to her front door. Her feet crunched down the shelly path. Then she was running, without conscious thought, faster towards the water, towards the rocky shore, to whatever the thrashing sea held in store.
Wishful thinking
Amber O’Sullivan, Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington
I was absolutely addicted to The Sims when I was a kid. I’d spend hours in the school holidays learning cheat codes to give the new humans I’d created everything they could possibly want. Sprawling multileveled houses and state-of-the-art appliances, rooms filled with easels and instruments, massive king-size beds with billowing canopies. Sometimes I’d go wild and build them hallways of mirrors or a cupboard built solely for one jukebox, a single square of space in front so that a lone sim could lock themselves inside and dance with nobody watching, save for me.
My parents thought it odd that I should fashion different make-believe lives for fictional characters, in lieu of living my own. They thought these hours were wasted and perhaps they were; I could have been out in the sun, I could have been constructing the foundations of my own life. I persevered despite their concerns and eventually designed houses that looked like my own, the sims that lived inside of them carefully moulded to look like my family and me. Then, my friends’ houses and their families, I even tried to give them comparable personalities and later, similar jobs and pets.
When my mum mentioned she was throwing away the old computer, I said I’d take it, dusty as it was from storage. The game took a while to load but I was patient in my excitement to see my creations again.
First, my family home, where my sister and I were still young and my parents still together. Then the various houses of my school friends, some of whom in real life I had not heard from in many years.
And then there you were, alone in your little house.
In the house I made for you, you are still happy.
LONG LIST
All hung out: Washing Lines of my Life
Deb Jowitt, Whangārei
No. 8 wire propped on cedar poles, Kaitaia. I’m three-years-old; my job is to take the billy to the letterbox. The Big Bad Wolf lives down our long driveway, my older brother says.
No. 8 wire again, Howick. We live opposite the cemetery and play among the graves. My brother and I throw red and white toadstools at one another; he says I’ve poisoned him.
1950s Hill’s Hoist, Mission Bay. Our father gives my brother and me air rifles for Christmas. Our first targets are each other, the washing line between us.
1960s Hill’s Hoist, Grafton. My partner and I live opposite Auckland Domain. Friends of friends are dying of overdoses. I hardly use the washing line.
Rope tied together between mānuka poles, Schooner Bay. A snapshot shows us holding our six-month-old son under a line full of billowing nappies. We look like star-struck teenagers.
Berkeley, San Francisco. No one uses a washing line in California, except the 75-year-old next door. His 101-year-old mother taught him to dry whites in the fresh air and sunshine.
No. 8 wire between posts, Tapu. Our two-year-old daughter wears my heels and her sunglasses to help hang out the washing. Even now, she’s never without accessories.
Foldout line, Mt Eden. The Hells Angels live three doors down. When our old villa catches fire in the middle of the night, they’re the only neighbours to check we’re alive.
1970s Hill’s Hoist, Parua Bay. It’s cemented in so well we haven’t replaced it. The ghosts of the people who built the house hang out there. There’s longing in their eyes as it turns.
Eel
Lou Annabell, Te Tara-O-Te-Ika-A-Māui The Coromandel Peninsula
1
She placed smooth oval rocks on the body of her brother. Her twin. He lay in the sun, polished and pink and told her that this would be his last day. They talked about the way their Aunty called them all to work. Their Nana’s dying lemon tree. The energy of the bees, and that time he got stung underfoot. He told her that he didn’t understand her tattoos. She got up and walked down to the harakeke. The water slowly rose to her knees. The cyclone had come and gone.
2
When she was eleven she started stealing Shapes from the Countdown in the mall with her friend Brooke. They would go for walks at night around town, both wrapped in polyester blankets. They talked about the possibility of danger. The way the blankets made it feel less possible. They usually made a visit to the Esplanade on these walks. The park with a tiny train and a shallow stream. In the pockets of her Mum’s quilted mauve jacket she’d stuffed a few Shapes. Bent over the stream she watched the family of eels curl over rocks and grass, the sound of them. Black hearts beating and spinning harder and faster as she crumbled the Shapes across the stream’s surface.
3
Now I am at her feet. The river washed me down stream. Her feet are beside me. I barely touch them but I know them. I go back into the grass, through the mud, I am almost unseen, until I feel her touch the blue down me.
Gymkhana meets Madonna
Sue Barker, Waipū
Thwack! A frozen hot dog landed at Cassie’s cowboy-booted foot, rapidly followed by a shower of raw onion rings, a bread roll and wisping paper napkins. Star reared on the lunge line as sachets of tomato sauce rained down.
“Jimmy,” Cassie yelled. “What are ya doing?”
She shook her head. Their parents had left her both the show and Jimmy – her crazy inventive brother. Last week he’d made a robo-shit-shoveler. Ten calves stampeded down main street. Week before he added RC batteries to the weaving poles. One horse and two clowns had to be put down –well, not the clowns. They were long gone after the cotton-candy affair on the carousel with Miss North-West. Cassie was still cleaning granulated sugar out of the gears.
“Jimmy, we’re broke, don’t waste the produce.”
“It’s for when the queues are long, sis. I can fire the orders to the punters…” He was using parts from their parents’ fatal human cannonball act, Vera and Lars Shoot for the Stars.
“I’m testing on the raw product to get the trajectory right.” Trajectory malfunctions ran in the family.
She’d taken their show in a whole new direction, limiting rodeo to barrel races and herding calves. Local riding schools did gymkhana, and the rest was sort of Annie Oakley meets Ariana Grande. Burlesque – which she loved. Handstands, flips – even hip-hop on Star’s bare back. Under a spotlight for the night shows and in a sequined leotard, Bowie knife and pistol strapped low on her hips.
“And will customers throw their cash back to you?”
“I won’t fire ‘til I seen the whites of their bank transfers on my phone.” He pushed his Stetson up, gawping like a side-show clown. Some days it’s a battle just to stay up in the saddle.
Lines
Rebecca Ball, Ōtautahi Christchurch
There are lines all over this bathroom. Two-bar towel rail, two shelves in the open cabinet, two stalks of toetoe propped against the blue. A pair of pink stripes round the waistband of your knickers. There are lines on the insides of your thighs, too, taut white, stripes you hide under boardies and boyshorts at the pool. In your bed.
Parallel lines never meet, they said, parallel lines help spell their own name. There were always two lines on teacher’s whiteboard beside your name, remember those, two lines across your mother’s forehead, two lines in the road as you drove away. Lines etched into the side of his headboard, or did you dream that? You must’ve dreamed that.
Faint smell of piss. You rotate to the right, fix your eyes on the two strips of black tiles round the top of the bath. Let them hold your eyes like magnets as you reach blind to the edge, feel for plastic stick and cap, push. Feel a click, slide your hands away, hold them to thickening air.
Dull ache like a bruise in your belly. In your breasts. Your backside’s burning from the thin plastic seat and there’ll be lines there, too, stamped pink into your skin. Your bare feet are prickling and there are hot lines of grouting under them, stretching away like white train tracks, under the bathroom door, on to somewhere else, on to nowhere.
The timer on your phone rings, thin and alien in your lap. Your belly bruise pulses. You close your eyes, reach out a hand, cold plastic in your palm, taste of grapefruit in your throat.
Parallel lines will meet only at infinity. Until then, this. Count the time in weeks and months. Think of a name for the space in between.
Miss Katherine Mansfield dreams of Menton and the many benefits of Heliotherapy
Alex Reece Abbott, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Drinking in the greying sky through a rain-pricked pane at The Elephant, she imagines the tremendous light Over There.
She is yearning for sunlight wild, so intense …could you ever get too much?
No danger of that here.
She imagines bright, blazing light, colours popping. Lemons, glowing golden lanterns like the ones on the tree at Karori. Magenta bougainvillea, white lilies, red roses.
Oh, and palms – they wouldn’t be nikau of course – but still she sees them, crowns silvered by the heat … and yes, some beach – not Days Bay, but … and rocky hills – not Thorndon, yet still steep and bush-clad, running down to the glittering turquoise sea.
It is imperative to bask, to be swallowed up. To know that glow. Dizzy after a day’s bathing. Even to be scorched, just a little burned … days back home at the bay when her nose had actually p-e-e-l-e-d. She can hardly imagine it now.
Bareheaded beneath the sky. Azure. Good word, write that down. To be mesmerized by a fierce sunset. Energised. She is certain that fiery conjuror will transform her mood, her very being. Yes, great heat and light will thaw her, get everything circulating again.
A rest cure to restore her … if only she could carry the sun in her pocket.
Yes, she’ll ask Māui to have a word with Ra, get him to send her some magic rays.
How has she taken it for granted for much of her life … but now, in the north, she realises that she is ruled, a child of the sun. She pushes aside her sentimentality, turns her back on the dull Hampstead day, and when her coughing abates, she dabs dark blood from the corner of her mouth, gathers up her little black Corona and her slender fruit-knife with the pounamu handle, and she packs for sun, packs for Menton.
Number 6 and Number 8
Benjamin Jardine, Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington
“Here is the head,” the doctor says, pointing to a gray orb in a sea of television static. The parents stare, dumbfounded.
“And here is the abdomen. Do you want to know the sex?”
“Yes,” says the father. “No,” says the mother.
“You don’t have to decide now.”
A pixelated photo of their baby spits out of a printer and the doctor is wiping off a tool with a paper towel and the father is checking the parking app on his phone.
At the drive thru on the way home, the father asks for a Number 6 large. The mother, one hand on her belly, asks for a Number 8 regular. Through the window they watch a teenager at the fryer and the mother is reminded of her first job, folding fish into old newspapers. The father remembers his mother, frying donuts in the bottom of a cast-iron pot.
At home, they scroll through a streaming service watching trailers until they find a programme they will both enjoy: a cooking competition where a dozen budding chefs undergo challenges to become the head chef of a gourmet restaurant.
“I’ve been waiting my whole life for this,” says one chef, who makes an involved soup using only the ingredients that sit there, overflowing out of a large wicker basket. The mother and father each take bites of their Numbers. The chefs chop carrots.
Before bed, the father takes a handful of oil and massages the mother’s belly. He places his head on her knee and sings “Frère Jacques” until he gets tired and turns off the light.
He snores but she lies still, awake, thinking of babies in static and wondering what her baby will wait its whole life to do. The churning of a distant dishwasher rocks her to sleep.
Now with 40% less carbs
Liz Breslin, Ōtepoti Dunedin
The fuck I will, he says. The. Fuck. I. Will.
But he will. My brother always goes on like this. Mouth mouth mouth and eventually trousers when he’s flashed his ego around enough to bruise us all.
In the end he takes the weight at the bottom. There’s more than one way to haul a cast iron bath up sixteen urban steps, just like there’s more than one way to skin a cat, though I will never forget the sight of that pinned-out pussy pelt at the A&P Show.
But he’s right. I should have measured to see if it would get through the doors. So. When he folds his arms and talks about muscle-to-weight ratio, I let him. When he spits on the petunias, I let him. When he asks for another whatever the fancy fuck beer this is I open a low carb with lime beverage with the top of mine and pass it over. When he starts in on his opinions about Those. Fucking. People. I don’t wait to hear who it is this time, I yawn and pass him his hoodie and say thankyousomuch Idon’twanttobelatetopickupthekids loveyoulots bye.
The fuck. I bend over my phone behind the wheel, climb back out of my car when I’m sure his has driven away, take the steps two at a time. Unspool the hot tap hose from the laundry.Hellycat jumps off the roof and rubs ownership on my feet.Three hours until I have to get the children and the bath will be ok to drain onto the grass while I do.
Once upon a time in West Auckland
Hayden Pyke, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
The bro is driving helter skelter and ducking Holdens. He knows a chick out west who’s holding, so when he says, “That us?” I can only say, “Leshgo!”
We roll up on a statie off Munroe. It’s hard up on the street so I tell him to pull a u-ey in case we have to gap it. Walking up to the gate we hear growls. She’s got a pitty and we double dutch. Flicking a look, we stall a minute then hit her on text. Soon she comes out. Sis is fully a snack, and she slinks out smooth as silk.
“Knots?” the bro asks. Sis looks at him sus and tells us to come round the back. I nod towards the decibels, and she smiles.
“I’ll tie him up.”
We find her five after burning a snorkel on the deck. We sit spinning yarns, and she passes after two.
“You’re brave to bring us back,” I say eventually.
She brings out a heater and puts it on the table.
“We’re not pressing you, sis,” I stammer. “We just want a knot and some pingers…”
“I know,” she replies. “But I’m not brave, I’m prepped.”
Then the pitty starts up. Some rooster is going off out front and we head out for the conflab. He’s about his gear’s being stepped on.
The sis steps to him giving him vocab. We see him throw hands and that’s us. Sis staggers back, one step, two. I catch her. She pulls the black butterfly, but the bro is there. The bro is holding her arms. She goes to put a spark in the rooster, but he’s out. The bro is red wine drunk. The bro is red. He lies down in the grass, and we scream. He lies down and is silent.
Parietal eye
Janis Freegard, Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington
Maybe it was all the meditation I’ve been doing but even so, it was a shock to wake up and feel it there. I knew something was different because I could see with my eyes shut. Not see ordinary, everyday things, like the poster of Che Guevara that Seth had insisted on hanging on our bedroom wall, but more sensing things – presences, moods. I was aware in a way I’ve never felt before.
When I got up and looked in the bathroom mirror, there it was. My third eye. I’d always thought they were on another sort of plane but mine was right there in the middle of my forehead. Fully open and visible, just like my other two.
Seth was making coffee in the kitchen.
“Notice anything different?”
He went to hand me a mug and recoiled. “What the hell?”
“I feel like I’ve entered a new phase of being.”
“Does it – work?”
“I can see Beth at your shoulder. And strings of anxiety floating around your head. Sort of yellow.”
“My sister Beth? Beth who died?”
“She’s beaming me a message that she’s okay and you shouldn’t worry.”
The strings of anxiety retreated a little.
We caught the bus into town together as usual. Seth wasn’t the only one who kept staring. It was worse at work. Everyone wanted to know how it felt, if I could contact their lost relatives. By lunchtime, I was exhausted. I could feel everyone’s emotions.
“Maybe you’re really a tuatara,” said Seth that evening. “You know, the parietal eye.”
In a dark corner of the living room, I could sense my late uncle Bert. “Your eggs are coming in,” he said. “If I were you, I’d get Seth to build you a nice cosy nest in the shed.”
Rural bliss
Sue Barker, Waipū
8am
The lamb’s lying flat on its side – should have brought a spade over. Neighbours ask too much. The ewe’s a first-time mum, grazing contentedly with the flock. I crouch, surprised to hear a feeble maa, I get a few drops in, leave her propped like a sphynx.
… family crisis – huh?You get sucked in. You’re useless at nurturing, they should’ve taken it with them. He scrapes flesh from possum skin.
10am
I gather the lamb onto my lap and force the teat in, formula sprays but for a minute she latches on, then flops.
It’ll die … you can’t save anything. He nails hides to the shed wall.
Noon
The lamb lifts her head, bleating as I approach. The ewe, perplexed, peers at usfrom down the paddock. More squirts taken. A strong breeze’s come up so I tuck the lamb behind a small ridge. The neighbours’ cat gives me a stare.
I could fix that lamb – permanently. He’s cleaning his rifle.
2pm
The wind swells, some idiot’s burning off. I sink to the ground, plonk the lambinto the crook of my arm and shove the teat in. She latches on well. Should’ve used tough love from the get-go.
You won’t hold it. You could never hold onto anything. He stands poised, holding his gun loosely as I leave.
4pm
The lamb feeds well, but the fire’s building, smoke billowing over us. The ewe trumpets an alarm baa, thunders up the paddock, stopping muzzle to my nose. Finally, maternal instinct. I focus on feeding as the cat arrives, stepping delicately over the lamb, settling herself on my crossed legs.
He’s leaning over the gate, watching me, firearm resting against his leg. The fire engine screams by, firefighters stare at our bucolic tableau: ewe, lamb, cat, husband, demented woman.
Talking electricity, my name
Michael Harlow, Manuherikia Alexandra
“Name’s Tennessee. When it’s not Kentucky. Where I was born a second time. And that’s more than a miracle. A Journeyman I was born into Electricity. As a boy tall as any cornstalk, I knew how to catch the Electric stuff, coil it in and collar it. It’s catastrophes I follow in my gypsy van.
Our home on the road. My Pitt Bull for company, he’s my best friend. Never lonesome when Pooch is on board. Let me tell you he is also cer-tif-i-catated. Tennessee Pit Bulls is the best kind. Pooch was also born in Kentucky. A second time with me. He can lick the paint off the side of any house.”
“Floods is best,” I say and he says, “What a nose for news, buddy. We get to work together in those big factory places that have taken a Big Hit. And the Bigger the Hit the more wire we get to pull, the more electricity we can bring back from that dead place it goes to.
“Motors? Fixing motors that have gone to the cemetery for dead ends. And those giant red, white and blue Transformers the prideful ones, our speciality. That’s right, isn’t it, Pooch buddy? He can raise his leg when it’s called for.
“Well, it’s all never pretty, when those disasters hits anywhere. And one moonshine day when I find me a wife, a travelling one who loves Electricity gone to the dogs, no offence, Pooch honey.
When I find One of those, and we have a kid, he’s already got his name. Little Tennessee. That’s it, buddy.”
The harvest
Susan Wardell, Ōtepoti Dunedin
Her arms are full of fruit she is longing to be rid of. At the community pantry outside of daycare she squeezes as many pears as she can onto the yellow shelves. Still, she is laden. She makes another stack on the ground, and hurries back to the car. It smells of baby food now, which also conjures up salt. She tries not to retch.
That night she can’t sleep, thinking of the bruised bodies underneath the swings. When dawn finally nooks a finger, she gives Mina a quick kiss and sneaks out to the garden, the children still asleep. She rakes the fallen pears – some a jealous green, some a blighted gold – into a pile at the base of the tree. But a glance up finds it withholding still. Just a handful more, and the season will finally be over. She chews her lip. She climbs.
Balanced aloft, she uses the full weight of her body to shake the branch. They refuse to come free. She lifts her weight, and lets it fall again, harder … and with a great crack, is borne down among the branches.
Shreds of dawn flutter above. Fists of pear press into her back. Pain is a suitcase which her mind climbs in and out of, her breath a metal click-clack. The swingset squeaks. Black roots branch downwards from her body, and she wonders what she will become once they reach the water table. After a while, Mina’s voice slithers up the hill, a rope working against gravity. She opens her throat.
Her hospital room smells astringent and chemical and perfect. Mina doesn’t bring the children to visit until the next day. They rush into her arms, sticky-faced. “We made CRUMBLE, Mama! We helped, Mum!” They lean in, offering love, and it smells rottingly sweet.
The resurrectionist’s apprentice
Atom Gush, Ōtepoti Dunedin
Mother tells me not to go in the graveyard. She also tells me not to go walking at night. So today I’m breaking two of her rules.
My friend, the full moon, hangs in the sky, watching to make sure I don’t trip on the swollen roots, knotted thorns, knife-point fence-spikes. “Thank you moon,” I sing out, “I’ll repay you later.”
I skip between the labyrinth of tombstones and crying angels. “Why are you sad?” I ask them. Mother always tells me to try understand how other people are feeling. They don’t answer.
Then, in the distance, I hear someone whistling. I think I heard the song on the radio once. I run towards it. It could be a ghost, I think to myself. I met a ghost once, but it phased through the wall before I could say hello.
But when I turn the corner, all I find is a wiry man in a tweed jacket and glasses. He holds a shovel, and whistles as he digs, throwing up a heap of dirt next to him. “Hello,” I shout, “What’s your name?”
He stops to peer at me before handing me a business card. It reads:
Anglesite Rotherford-Hart,
Resurrectionist.
He continues what he was doing. “Why are you digging?” I ask.
He grins, teeth as a shark’s. “I will end death itself,” he says, “I will remake myself, piece by piece, until I am whole.” He seems on the verge of a bout of maniacal laughter, but restrains himself.
“Why are you doing it at night?”
He adopts a mocking voice. “Because it’s not allowed. Because theft is morally reprehensible.”
I nod solemnly. I know what it’s like to not be allowed.
He pauses digging and looks at me. “How would you like a job?”
Took the dog – Visited the sea
Madeleine Child, Ōtepoti Dunedin
There are usually always great mounds of beached kelp, and sometimes it is not a mound of kelp but a sea lion half burying itself. Sometimes there’s one lolling about in the water – a Selkie maybe – maybe waiting for the dark when she will shed her fur-skin and dance barefoot in the moonlit sand again. Sometimes the waves wash up swathes of krill, leaving them to drown in air. And although it has been three-quarters of a lifetime I still never dwell at the bluff at the end where the land sticks out too far into the sea, and the sea pounds back against the rocks. Rocks that augur undertow and maelstrom.
I learnt later that it was an extraordinarily low Spring Tide. The dog is already sniffing out the new territory – immense sea caves gouged deep out of the rocky headland. The walls are caked in visceral pink algae and fringed with huge bunches of sea tulips and thick-stemmed bull kelp – stead-fastened to the rocks. Without any watery support they are all collapsed –splayed out on the immaculate floor. Glinting water-drops spring off the cliff-face above, making a neat row of piss-flowers in the sand below. And there is a strange unearthly smell –as if the sudden exposure to air has caused a reaction, a release. The dog is loopy with it –this frontier of only unfamiliar smells. When he sees, further round, a whole new beach stretching out, he is off.Bolted, gone.
He is a speck – and it is at first impossible to make out which direction he is going. But now I can see that he is bounding back. Carrying a massive kelp holdfast that must have relinquished its grip. Must have let go.
Woman of letters
Barbara Strang, Ōtautahi Christchurch
You’d think there’d be a pile of smashed boards lying close by … if it was a Saturday night prank. But no, they’d ripped the entire cedar special away from its post, screws and all, no sign of it left behind. It was quite posh, like a miniature chalet. An old lady bought it for me after she ran into and crushed the old letter box. Maybe it was stolen to enhance someone’s street appeal. I was away when it happened, I was down south at my mother’s funeral. In her life she wrote me many newsy letters until she grew too old. I used to write back to both my parents, covering four sides with my doings. Once when I was at home, I said I had an ambition to become a writer. My father said I was too bad at spelling. To get back to the letter box, the policeman said they’d keep a lookout for a stray box with “17” on it when they visited the usual suspects. So he said. The sun’s beating on my head as I comb the local parks; wandering over dried-up grass, nothing to see; peering into bushes and thickets, only paper and plastic bags. The sun is high, it’s between eleven to four, and I’m getting blasted, despite protective clothing and sunhat. And there’s skin cancer in my family. My grandfather died from it and my father had it too. Next thing I’ll get it, and I’ll need a letter box, to receive the test results. To cap it off, I do not have my mother anymore, and if she sent a letter from wherever she is now, it couldn’t be delivered. My father died too, but not of melanoma. His one letter to me contained a spelling mistake.
Judges’ Report NFFD 2023
David Eggleton and Airini Beautrais
Flash fiction should emphasise compression, concision and language working at maximum force to convey a situation or scenario, or best of all some insight or epiphany transcending the mundane and the quotidian. Flash fiction needs to be good at suggesting the allusive, the allegorical, the metaphorical, the evocative in order to provide depth for repeated reading. So it is really quite a demanding form, thinking bonsai and ikebana, and because of this compression, with every word working strongly to convey meaning, it is closely related to prose poetry.
All ten short-listed stories qualify as doing impressive things within the form. For the NFFD 2023 competition, we favoured stories that controlled the tone that created the mood, be it rhapsodic or realistic, and were sustained towards a satisfying conclusion. We also favoured those with sophisticated twists and turns, or a sense of multiple scenarios and allusions at work.
We would like to congratulate all the finalists, and to thank everyone who entered the competition. We were entertained, challenged and intrigued by your stories. Keep writing!
THE SHORT LIST
‘The Rocky Shore’
In its urgency and drive, this piece of flash fiction suggested the beginning of a longer story. The story builds a lot of anticipation in a short space of time, and the climactic moment leaves room for ambiguity. We appreciated the strongly-registered Gothic-poetic atmosphere.
‘Wishful Thinking’
The wistfulness was well-modulated, with elements of some personal memoir, confession or diary extract. There is a real ’90’s nostalgia in this piece, but it also takes a creepy turn towards the end – who is the ‘you’ who is being watched?
‘Because/ Some days’
Some fascinating broken prose rhythms. The cryptic structure makes it a bit puzzling. There is an interesting juxtaposition of mental health concerns and the online world with simple connections with nature.
‘The Kina Girl’
Very strong imagery, with some limpid stylistic touches. There are clear roots in family and history; the sugar bags suggest a setting in the past.
‘Shotgun’
Great metaphorical resonances and a strategic arrangement of elements. The playfully argumentative discussion about a house conveys a lot about the relationship between the characters. There is a sense of loss and longing here.
WINNERS
HIGHLY COMMENDED
‘Uncle’ is highly commended for its twist and turns, its period-era detail contributing a rich texture, and for its strong characterisations within a limited space. The child’s-eye view is well done, youthful without being contrived.
‘Shell Game’ is highly commended for its dynamic narrational unfolding, and for its brisk twists and turns which conveyed a strong sense of time and place. Comical and serious elements are interspersed in a way that is ultimately satisfying.
THIRD PLACE
We liked the folded time-frame of ‘Revelations’; its effective contrasts between then and now; its depiction of the intersections between family relationships and belief, and the well-conveyed immediacy of its climate emergency theme.
SECOND PLACE
We chose ‘Wayfinding’ as runner-up, for its exuberance, its open-ended ending, its poetic licence, language and imagery. It feels wild and out-there, and also fresh and surprising, perhaps slightly hallucinatory, but in a good way.
FIRST PLACE
‘Moon Landing’, with its layered textures, is very sophisticated in its management of strategies and elements and time shifts. Its mysterious poetry, its elegiac and poignant qualities, are neatly combined with humour. But more than this, its cumulative effects challenge and enrich our sense of possibilities about the world. This story rewards re-reading, and stays with the reader afterwards. It does all of what what we were looking for in a winner.