100 x 100 Competition Winner
Jo Sadler • 14 June 2020
Winning Entry in our first 100 x 100 Flash Fiction Competition !
I'd like to thank all the entrants in our 100 x 100 competition (and Simon Whaley too for doing the judging!)
Congratulations and the prize of £100 goes to Natasha Derczynski.
Keep a look out for the new 100 x 100 competition starting in July. Here is the winning entry:
Our Cycle
First pee of the day, a hot ten second stream. Dizzying fear then a five-minute countdown.
Minute one. Three years before. The diagnosis. Burying myself in him, grieving for hope, then reviving.
Minute two. Swollen with eggs. A needle. My wall, pierced. Pieces of us incubate together.
Three. It hasn’t worked. Loss, all over again. Another cycle, another failure. Grief onto grief. We are young but dark circles form.
Four. One year to recover, return to one another. Then return to the waiting room, resigned, determined, tired but ready.
Five. Hold up the stick. It’s positive.
Oh God.
How sublime.
Here is the winner of our spooky ghost / horror story NAWG 2025 Autumn 250-word Flash Fiction competition . It ran from Friday 3rd to Friday 31st October, First, second, and third place entries will also be published in Link magazine. See the website HERE The prize of £25 for the winning entry goes to SUSAN KING for her story: RUSSIAN ROULETTE. I dread this day. Pumpkins with grinning faces and kids running about dressed as ghosts. Ghosts don’t wear costumes, they’d know that if they’d seen one. I can cope with all that – it’s the knocking on doors blackmailing adults into giving them treats that frightens me. Don’t they know how dangerous this is? Agnes has a bucket of Cadbury Heroes by the door. Her children have grown up and left home which is a relief to me, I can tell you I want to yell at the little ones who stand with expectant faces when she opens the door. Bugger off, I want to shout. But of course, I can’t. You can’t imagine the horror of watching her fill her syringe and pierce the wrapper of a chocolate bar, plunging the needle into the gooey inside and withdrawing it empty. You don’t know what it’s like to watch helpless as she smiles and hands out the sweets. She’s not daft enough to poison each one. For her it’s a game of Russian roulette. She waits for the post on the village Facebook page. She reads the hundreds of messages of sympathy with glee, scrolls slowly through emojis of crying faces, pink hearts and praying hands. She notes the date of the funeral and gets out her dark clothes. It’s the same black dress and coat she wore my cremation. A human black widow spider, she dispensed with me after our children were born. It’s just other people’s children she dislikes.
Members can go to the Members Only page (you'll need the password) and read stories that were a little too long to fit in the normal Link magazine - see the section marked 'Fiction Special' --> HERE
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