Congratulations to WriterAdvice’s Flash Fiction winners, those who came close, and everyone with the courage to submit. We were impressed with the quality of submissions, and we selected six winners this time.
As we made our selections, we tried to include a variety of subjects as well as tightly written and evocative pieces. You’ll see our reasoning below each entry, and a new winner will be posted each week.
Please continue submitting. There are lots of places seeking flash fiction and all kinds of writing.
Our next contest, which we’re calling Flash Prose, is open. If you can’t find what you need, click on Discovery at Submittable, the same site where you submitted to us.
And the Winners Are
7-01-26 The Value of Fat by Shelley Stutchman
7-06-26 Smoke and Mirrors by Scott Dukette
7-13-26 Operation Chaos by Karin Cooper
7-20-26 It’s So Hot I Feel Like I’m On Fire by Jane Harkins
7-27-26 The Butterdish by Cassie Hussey
8-03-26 The Microwave by Alison Smith
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Operation Chaos
By Karin Cooper
Timing is crucial in abduction.
“My journal!” Birdie stops short.
“Got it!” The journal, toiletries, and laundry are stuffed into a Hefty bag. I shift it to my left arm, hooking my right hand over the handlebar of the Mighty Mack walker, pulling Birdie behind me. We accelerate from a snail’s pace to a turtle’s crawl.
The two nurses are occupied. I remind Birdie not to say anything, and she nods. Birdie likes being part of Operation Chaos.
“We’re leaving,” I mumble. A patient can’t leave the skilled nursing station without permission.
The nurse doesn’t look up. “Okay. Let me just check we have the doctor’s clearance for an outside appointment.”
“Leaving for good.” Calm and collected is crucial when abducting a patient. Even if the patient is one’s mother.
Operation Chaos sprang into action twenty-four hours ago. Ignoring consent from her doctor or me, they swiftly transferred Birdie from Assisted Living to Skilled Nursing. Skilled is subjective. A UTI. Antibiotics. Still, Birdie remains confined. A week with no physical therapy, each day bedridden weakening her further.
The nurse looks up with a stiff smile. It takes her a second to process the situation. We are rule breakers. The nurse retreats to find reinforcements.
Just one long corridor left, and I will break Birdie out of Samarkand’s Skilled Nursing. The only sound is Birdie’s heavy plop of one wide-toe box, Velcro-strapped, beige orthopedic shoe planting down while the other foot lifts up. The slow plodding gait is from a Traumatic Brain Injury, a hip replacement, osteoporosis, and stiffness from several days of bed confinement.
My fist clenches; I am angry. I am an adult-child angry at our society’s mass shoulder shrug to Code Old. I am angry at the understaffed and under-motivated medical elder care training. I am angry at pharmaceutical drugs haphazardly doled out. I am angry at the appalling indifference of government regulators, media, and watchdog groups to these violations of human dignity. I am angry at an industry posturing as a trustworthy authority, charging exorbitant prices to families who are then rendered voiceless once their loved one is contracted in their care.
There are no campus protests except for me.
In two weeks at the uber-expensive Samarkand, the atmosphere has been contentious. Brochures promised a campus of care, harmony, and Christian neighborly friendship. We arrived excited, moving her into a new studio with a kitchenette, balcony, and garden patio.
Nurse Maria greeted us curtly. “You’re late.”
She immediately issued a required “safety test” where Birdie had to get from bed to the patio door in under thirty seconds without a cane or walker. No chance to prepare.
Birdie knew the importance. Head up, eyes focused, she slowly planted each foot, her brain sending sluggish signals.
She clicked the stopwatch with a sadistic Nurse Ratched aura: “Twenty-nine and a half seconds.”
“You passed, Mom.”
A week later Birdie’s removed from her studio.
“Medicare will cover costs if you have her doctor admit her to Skilled Nursing,” informs the insurance-billing clerk.
“Why would Doctor Morris admit her if she’s not sick?”
The clerk coldly repeats the insurance requirement, adding, “Then you’ll have to pay the private rates.”
With a shove against the slow-moving automated double doors, we adjust our eyes to the raw natural morning light.
“Oh, it’s chilly.” Birdie stops.
“Eighty-five today.” I pull us toward the getaway car.
She’s Admiral Bird deciding on conditions for the trek. “Then I don’t need to button the sweater now.”
Activity is picking up around the campus. A golf cart emblazoned with large lettering, SECURITY, is coming straight toward us. But like everything on campus, it too is slow. In my rear-view mirror, I see the skilled nursing doors parting and nurses rushing out as we speed away.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” I used to love reciting the Philip Larkin poem to Birdie. But today I added my own new line: “I may not mean to, but I keep fucking up too.”
The former fourth-grade teacher, always the lady, reprimands me. “Don’t use that kind of language.”
I look over at my mother. She’s happy to be in the car and not in a bed. My mother opens her journal and clicks her pen. “Now what?” she asks, assuming I have another plan.
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Karin Cooper is the founder of TravelingLadies.net and runs the Facebook community Caregiving Daughters for women caring for aging mothers. Two novels are currently waiting publication, Cake Angels, and Christmas Puppies. Writing work includes, Writing Expert, Mercor Intelligence, evaluating large language model outputs for clarity, tone, and narrative effectiveness.
Editor’s Note: As a former caregiver I found the narrator’s enthusiasm for the project lovely. The capering opening and ending worked because of the double meanings, tight writing, and sense of adventure. WTG!
Check in on Tuesday, July 21 to see our read our next winner’s piece. We’d love to have you submit to our current contest. Details and Submittable link.
Smoke and Mirrors
By Scott Dukette
Lillian’s gut felt queasy as she went into the bar. Although smoking indoors had been banned citywide for many years, the atmosphere still seemed hazy – as if decades of accumulated fumes still hadn’t cleared.
It was an odd place to choose for her first meeting with her birth father – a man she’d thought about daily over the past 40 years but had never taken shape into an actual person, with a face, a body, hands, or a soul. But it seemed fitting somehow to meet at a nondescript anonymous dive where she’d never been before and would never go again.
“Hey little lady!” a fat man at the bar blurted out as soon as she entered. “Let me buy you a drink. The sky’s the limit – anything you want!”
“Oh, please God, let that not be my father,” Lillian prayed to herself, “Please, please, please!” She exhaled when she realized he didn’t fit the description she’d been provided – slender 60s man, bearded and balding.
She ignored the man and proceeded slowly into the gloom, to a booth near the back that seemed to offer some amount of privacy. While the front entrance was not directly visible from the booth, it could be easily monitored in the mirror hanging over the table if Lillian sat in exactly the right position.
Although she’d arrived at exactly the agreed-upon meeting time, her procreator remained elusive for the next 90 minutes. The mirror over Lillian’s table had reflected about two dozen customers entering the bar during that time. Most of them seemed to be younger men, with a few women mixed in. The few 60s men she’d seen were large. Like fatso at the bar, whom she’d started thinking of as “Lew” for no reason she could be certain about.
As Lillian finished her third drink, she scrolled through her phone to the number she’d been using to correspond with her father, blocked it, and hit delete. On her way out, she smiled at Lew, who gave her a wink and a big grin of his own. For a split second, she considered climbing onto the empty stool next to him. Maybe the attention of someone friendly and demonstrative would be better than no attention at all.
But two young men entering the bar while bantering loudly, accompanied by a burst of cold air from outside, interrupted her thoughts and she slipped out through the door before it closed.
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Scott Dukette retired from a longtime career in 2025 and now splits his time between Austin, Lake Champlain, and Valle de Bravo, Mexico. He and his wife, Barbara are avid international travelers.
Editor’s Note: Scott skillfully showed us what the man at the bar knew and the woman couldn’t see. This is shown well and only essential information exists, but there’s plenty for us to imagine. Nice work!
The Value of Fat
by Shelley Stutchman
Brittany measured her worth in before-and-after photos. Before the wedding. After the wedding. Before the vacation. After the vacation. She starved herself for these events, then ate in secret until her body once again found every pound, plus interest. At thirty-five, unmarried and two hundred and fifty pounds, she moved through the world like an inconvenience. People didn’t seem to notice her when she entered a room. Men looked past her. Brittany felt invisible.
It seemed almost everyone else had melted away pounds with a shot once reserved for diabetics, now repurposed for weight loss. Friends who once shared pizza with her now spent their time shopping for smaller sizes and living glamorous lives, while Brittany stayed the same.
One night, the indigestion that followed from eating an entire pizza by herself prevented her from falling asleep, Brittany stripped and stood naked before the mirror. She pressed her stomach flat with both hands, as if trying to turn into someone who fit into this world of skinny people. Her flesh slipped back into place the moment she let go, as if it belonged there more than she did. She tried to imagine herself thin, wanted. That night, she decided she would take the shot, charge it to her Mastercard, and accept the debt. Being beautiful was all that mattered, but to Brittany, being wanted mattered even more.
The next morning, Brittany walked into a med-spa clinic, instantly feeling uneasy, thinking she didn’t belong here. All the women in the waiting room were thin, radiating the confidence Brittany lacked. She turned to leave, but the receptionist walked toward her and then gently touched her shoulder. “Come sit down,” she said, her voice soft and welcoming. Brittany sat because that was what fat girls did: they obeyed. The receptionist smiled and slid her phone across the counter. “See that fat girl?” she said, tapping the screen. “That was me six months ago.”
An hour later, Brittany left the med-spa. Her purse bulged with boxed syringes, and the pricey elixir promising thinness. The receptionist hugged her tightly. “You’re going to love this,” she whispered. Outside, catching her reflection in the tinted glass, she looked the same. Yet now, hope tugged at her chest; it felt fragile, electric, and terrifying.
The next morning, Brittany turned on the news. “Emergency public health announcement,” the reporter said. “All overweight individuals must report to the nearest medical facility immediately. All weight-loss injections are recalled.” She swallowed. “Patients who’ve received injections for three months or more are experiencing rapid systemic failure. The drug suppresses all fat production. Some fat is biologically essential. Without it, the body cannot survive.”
Brittany dressed and went to the nearest clinic. The waiting room was packed with thin bodies, faces tight with fear. Heads turned the moment she entered. A nurse called her name and hurried her past the others into a room with a few other fat men and women. A man in a suit told them they were a national resource. Their fat cells were urgently needed to save lives. The government would pay each of them $250,000 a week to donate their fat cells until the crisis was contained. Brittany did the math. In one month, she would be a millionaire. As she passed back through the waiting room, thin people watched her with envy. Brittany felt visible and wanted. Now, everyone wanted to be like Brittany.
Shelley Malicote Stutchman is an award-winning author, speaker, breast cancer survivor, freelance newspaper reporter, featured writer for Caregiver Magazine, and blog writer. Her book, Peek-A-Boob: Uncovering Breast Cancer, has received numerous awards. In 2025, she received the Honorable Eileen Echols Inspired Woman Award. She lives by the belief that every challenge can become a story of hope.
Editor’s Note: What a delightful turn of events in the end of this story. Over the years we’ve read a great deal about being overweight and loving oneself, but we’ve never seen this unique perk. WTG!
