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| | Our submitters know a good opportunity when they see it, so we’re excited to once again host the Fractured Lit Flash Fiction OPEN from May 11 to July 12, 2026.
No themes. No prompts. Just your wildest imaginations and your best, most engaging flash and microfiction! We want to showcase that story that took you minutes or hours or months to perfect. Portray those characters who will face their fears, who will act, who will get into trouble, and who will create tension on the page. Those are the characters we can’t stop wondering about. Play with format and structure, play with tropes and archetypes, and bring us something only you could create! Tell us the story we didn’t know we were yearning for!
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Pamela Painter, who will choose one grand-prize winner and fifteen finalists from a shortlist of forty stories curated by our editors. The first-place winner will receive $2,000 and publication, while the fifteen finalists will receive $100 and publication. All entries will be considered for general publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
Guest Judge: Pamela Painter"I’m looking for an irresistible beginning, a startling image or a dazzling curl of language, then a wild streak of movement or a slow pulse of the heart, all with underlying tension and urgency, and always an end that brings the special world of the story to the only possible finish. Surprise me, and most of all, make me wish I had written your story." |
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 | New Flash Fiction | Gretel Overhears Her Parents by Cheryl Pappas | Gretel wakes in the middle of the night with the kind of hunger that claws at your insides, as if it were a feral creature trying to get back to the woods. She hears Hansel’s soft breathing in the dark, the faint sound of jazz downstairs, and the distant, tremulous voice of her stepfather. There is simply no getting out of it; she has to go down to the kitchen.
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|  | New Flash Fiction | In Dreams You’re Mine All of the Time by Patricia Q. Bidar | James was grieving the death of his father, who’d mistrusted Michaela. Too dark a horse, he’d warned. She’d be the one to break him. James had told Michaela this in bed, laughing, after a good and unhurried sexual encounter, the night their daughter was conceived. The old man’s money paid for this trip to Ireland. | | |
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 | New Micro Fiction | The Taxonomy of the Echo by J.M.C. Kane | The first time the house swallowed a sound, we blamed the insulation. A penny fell from your fingers, flashed once, and never landed.
By June, the kitchen had gone almost entirely mute. A plate could burst across the linoleum without a crack. We learned to live by what we saw: your raised eyebrow for the coffee is ready, my hand on the wall for I’m leaving. | | | | |
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 | Give your characters something to do that is opposed by another character. Characters alone are often too static for flash fiction. | | |
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70 SW Century Drive, Suite 100442
97702,Bend |
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