It’s with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the Gothic New Worlds flash fiction competition and their winning entries. We hope you find them as delectable as we did.
First Place: Barbara Brownie
The Hardy Tree
What are these beasts above ground? Breath, and voices, and blood pumping. They make territorial claims to a narrow slice of enchanted soil, and a stone crown. But this is not their land to claim. I am here. My roots own this soil. I grow Ash from their ashes.
Second Place: Eva Bradshaw
We are not dead. We may lie in the packed earth, our fingernails black and lips pulling from our teeth, but we are not dead. The dead are at the back. Beneath brambles and ivy, their tombs sink into the soil. They are the forgotten. They are the dead.
Third Place: Toothpickings
It wasn’t the piercing of her skin that hurt, it was the lazy irony. Preparing for a vampire symposium had been draining, but this was a little on the nose, she thought. Vampires just aren’t original anymore, thought Dr. George, as she sank into eye-rolling oblivion.
Barbara will be receiving a limited edition of OGOM’s first book Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day.
We were incredibly excited to read all the submissions and were delighted with the range and quality of them all – a wonderful reflection of the event itself.