I won a flash fiction prize in the Cracked Flash Fiction Competition in December 2016. My piece was entitled “The Understanding.” You can read it HERE, or you can just scroll down the page. I decided to post a screenshot as this news is a couple of years old now, and you just never know when some website will go down or they’ll decide not to keep your piece live. Many thanks once again to the judges at Cracked Flash Fiction. This is flash fiction after all, so it’s short enough to fit a single screen. Here it is:

I went back and took a screenshot of the prompt for this story:

I particularly loved the judge’s comments at the beginning of this:

I want to take a moment to appreciate the finesse that little details about the characters are dropped to build an image of them in the mind. Without ever saying outright that Mrs. Baker is a construction worker, we see that she’s wearing a flannel shirt and a hardhat (and, presuming this is mostly from her POV, ‘an outboard motor’ sounds like something a construction worker would be able to recognize (I certainly wouldn’t be able to)). There might have been a little more build-up to the climax, or the climax a little bigger–it felt like the story started at a mezzo-piano and only grew to a mezzo-forte or forte (sorry to bust out the music terminology out). I really like how much this piece of flash relies on extrapolating data–I had to reread it a couple of times to get all of the nuances. Good job with this!

—Mariah Burkett

A few other stories I’ve written that may interest you include: “Do You Know the Bunny Hop?,” “Strings of Solace,” and “The Meek Inherit.”