Who made the cut?
Now, this was a fun one. Folked-Up Flash brimmed with magick and mayhem, transformation and abomination, ritual and gristle, brutality and poignancy. New takes on familiar tales and lesser-known myths abounded, and we followed your breadcrumbs down some twisted and bizarre paths in stories that stuck with us like a curse.
Whether full of crows, wolves, spirits, woodsmen, witches, bogs, rocky shores, moonlight, or funeral pyres, this flavor of folk horror and dark fairy tales includes the type of stories that always seem to find a spot or two in our Top 10 no matter the contest theme, so it sure is handy to have a bunch of them all in one place. So much so that we couldn’t limit ourselves to just 10, and we stretched the winners’ circle to 11.
The following writers had stories that avoided the chop for several rounds, but didn’t quite squeak into the Top 10.
Close-but-no-cigar shortlist shout-outs go to:
10th (TIE):
“Root Cellar” by Max Firehammer / “The Dancing Twins” by Terri Potvin
9th: “Skins” by
8th: “The Borrowers” by
7th: “The Beetle Men of Meadow Brook” by
6th: “A Becoming” by Nikki Gonzalez
5th: “Closer” by Neil Clark
4th: “The Axe” by Lisa Beebe
And now for the three stories that really lit things up…
3rd Prize ($100)
“A Surplus of Daughters”
by E.B. Schnepp
2nd Prize ($200)
“Wolves from the Sky”
by Liz Fyne
1st Prize ($300)
“The Precipice”
by
Congrats to the winners and a huge thanks to everyone who participated in our Folked-Up Flash contest!
Check back within a week for the Folked-Up Flash mega-issue.
The Molotov Cocktail 