I
Angels of Purgatory
by Chris Panatier
II
The Black Cat’s Breakfast
by Chandra Steele
III
Mandible
by Phillip E. Dixon
IV
Day Ninety-One
by Joanne Withers
V
The Places We Go Where Others May Not Follow
by Liz Schriftsteller
VI
Crop Circles
by Christina Dalcher
VII
What the Crows Said
by Erin Fingerhut
VIII
The Unopened Bar of Chocolate
by Steve Campbell
IX
Threes
by Christina Dalcher
X
The Last Horizon
by Michael Carter
Phantom Flash is now closed.
Results announced at 10 AM (PST)
on February 13th.
It’s your lucky day, slackers!
Procrastinator’s Special keeps late submissions
open until February 6th.
“It is far harder to murder a phantom
than a reality.”
– Virginia Woolf
Submit to Phantom Flash
Time to get weird. The Phantom Flash contest focuses on the strange and surreal, on the otherworldly and unsettling, on the things that just don’t have any rational explanation. Let your minds wander to the darkest corners of your imagination, where the fluidity of dreams pours over concrete realities. The parameters for this contest are as boundless as the cosmos.
We simply ask that you include some uncanny, otherworldly, or fantastic element in your entry. Strange phenomena can be based in science or out on the farthest fringes of sci-fi. We’re fans of “The Twilight Zone,” “Twin Peaks,” and some of “The X-Files,” so those types of themes are a good place to get some inspiration. You can go more ghost story or horror with it if you’d like, or drift into magical realism. Fantasy, fables and fairy tales may be a tougher sell here, but put a dark or offbeat twist on it and those could work too.
Some jumping off points to get those story ideas churning: telekinesis, cryptids, doppelgängers, aliens, ectoplasm, seances, electromagnetic disturbances, time travel, shape-shifting, radioactive meteors, black-eyed children, demon possession, vortexes into other dimensions, rapid aging, supernatural visions, lizard people, black magick, crop circles, ball lightning, astral projection, psychedelic drugs, bilocation, the Bermuda triangle, wormholes, levitation, spontaneous human combustion, or anything else your twisted mind can cook up. We want you to branch out and weave uncanny tales the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
The top three entries will win cold, hard cash (USD):
$200 for Phantom Flash winner
$100 for 2nd place
$50 for 3rd place
We also give mad props to 4th-10th place,
publishing them in our Phantom Flash mega-issue
and in a future print anthology, with contributor copy included.
Submit to Phantom Flash
Follow these guidelines, and you could have some extra coin in your pocket, and some bragging rights as the Phantom Flash winner.
– All submissions must absolutely be under 1,000 words, and we tend to look more kindly on 750 or fewer because… SPECTRAL SQUIRREL!
– All contest submissions will be read blind, so we won’t be playing favorites. Sorry, apparition of Mom.
– Please paste your submission into the corresponding field. Do not list your name anywhere in your submission or we’ll assume that you don’t know how to read.
– Costs $7 $9 to enter during the Procrastinator’s Special. (Sorry, no refunds.)
– We reserve the right to extend deadlines if necessary (and you can expect our usual week-ish Procrastinator’s Special—with corresponding increase in submission fee for you slackers).
– Submissions must be previously unpublished work, and you will retain copyright (duh). By entering this contest you give us permission to publish your work—if selected for our Top 10—both online and in a future print anthology.
– No limit on how many entries you can submit, but you must submit them one at a time. Don’t just mash them all in there.
– Early Bird deadline is December 10th, 2018. Contest deadline is end of day (PST) January 31st, 2019. Procrastinator’s Special deadline is February 6th, 2019. Winners announced on February 13th, and we’ll unleash the Phantom Flash mega-issue shortly thereafter.
– And, most importantly, this is a PHANTOM FLASH contest, so you must include some sort of uncanny, otherworldly, or fantastic element. But again, this can be in any form imaginable.
So that means you can go all…
or all…
or all…
or all…
or even all…
Make us believe.
Submit to Phantom Flash
The Molotov Cocktail 