Winners of our Flash Fiction Contest

Important Update for 2020: Following the October-December 2019 contest (winners published in Issue 173 on April 1, 2020), the Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Contest will operate on an annual basis. Submissions for the annual Flash Fiction Contest will be open from April 1 to June 30. Winning flash fiction(s) will be published in our yearly awards issue in October.

First Prize: Jessica Manack / Second Prize: Jessica Pitchford / Third Prize: Tyler Lacoma

FIRST PRIZE, july-September 2019

The Call of the Campervan

Klaus’s wife was like the Sphinx, all square jaw and silence. Her English wasn’t as good as his. It wasn’t her choice to come over here; there was little use in pretending. But she attended the party, dutiful. There was a cake, though no one believed he’d done what he’d been sent here to do. It seemed as though there should be a cake. He talked about their itinerary, pulling maps out of his jacket pocket. First Canada, over the summer, then down through the U.S. and a while in Mexico. He now measured his life out in Whiles. He talked about the shower in the camper, its six square feet. He talked about the awning under which they’d have coffee, watching the rising sun. The vice presidents frowned. The accountants smiled. He’d been a good boss, had me and my boyfriend to their place for fondue one evening, some cheese he’d snuck over in his luggage, the real deal. We laughed and laughed, full bottles of wine replacing the empties. We shared airport stories, road trip stories, stories not requiring idioms. Finally someone looked for a clock and then said, Is it broken? It says 3:45 a.m. In some stories this is where everything gets all wiggly, but Klaus kept it on the up and up. Nobody was drunk: all that bread. In the conference room, the cake started to sweat. We broke the fire code. He told us again about the five shirts they were each keeping. He told us about how the table turned into a bed. Oh, Klaus! Klausie-Mausie! I pinched his bicep, a thumbful of tweed, said, You won’t be needing these any more! He said, Every day this week I go home, take off my suit, and use it to clean the garage.

~~~

Jessica Manack earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Hollins University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband and two small children. In addition to her creative writing, she works in marketing communications. Her writing has recently appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and If and Only If.

SECOND PRIZE, july-September 2019

On Top of Spaghetti

Italian immigrant Cancetto Farmica—or was it Forenzio Concippio or Formico Cansetto, the papers couldn’t decide—was twenty-three years old in 1911 when a blow to the head from a tent stake by a fellow carny worker in McColl, South Carolina, did him in. The victim—by varying reports a trumpet player, a lion tamer, or a handyman—succumbed to his wounds just over the state line in Laurinburg, North Carolina. It took sixty-one years to bury him.

It only took forty-five minutes to embalm him. My great-grandfather did it, without gloves or a mask or air flow. He lived to be eighty-five. The embalming happened like most did back then, on good faith that the family was coming to claim the body. The father did stop by, but he didn’t speak any English. A receipt shows he put down $10 towards the embalming, indicated he’d be back with the rest and specific instructions for a Catholic burial then was never heard from again. Great-grandpa said he kept the body around in case the man’s family ever returned, but keeping it around turned to stringing a rope under the man’s armpits and letting him dangle on the embalming room wall, wearing nothing but a loincloth.

Eventually, my great-grandfather took the mummified body down off the wall, put him and the tent stake that killed him in a pine box with a glass front, and propped him up in the garage of the funeral home. My grandfather, born just after the carnival worker arrived at the mortuary, inherited the business and kept the body on display. Visitors came from far and wide to see Spaghetti—nobody knew how to pronounce his real name, so that was what they called him—posing for snapshots with the slight, leather-skinned man with sunken sockets and surprisingly bright teeth. Until New York congressman Mario Biaggi, running for reelection in 1972, got wind of it. Papaw insisted he and his father before him hadn’t meant any harm. “What’s the difference,” he told The New York Times, “in having this man here and having those mummies in museums?” When the national  attention and pressure proved too much, Papaw arranged for a service and a marker, and in 1973 watched a man he never knew but who’d lived with his family his entire life be lowered into the earth. Papaw always said the stories about two tons of concrete being poured over the coffin to protect the grave from vandals were only stories.

I wasn’t alive then, and my grandfather and great-grandfather aren’t alive now, but I visit the cemetery when I’m passing through, and I think about the carnival and family and Tom Glazer, who was born to immigrant parents and wrote that earworm children’s song “On Top of Spaghetti” in 1963, ten years before Cancetto Farmica was finally laid to rest. I imagine what the weight of two tons of poured concrete does to a coffin and wonder if anybody ever rests in peace.

~~~

Jessica Pitchford’s fiction has appeared in Extract(s), Gris-Gris, storySouth, New Delta Review, Waypoints, and elsewhere. The former Editor-in-Chief of Pembroke Magazine, she now teaches writing and literature to high-achieving high schoolers at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics.

THIRD PRIZE, july-September 2019

The Wall

I loved the Berlin Wall. God, yes.

I was Lorelei. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. My siren sisters and I sang on the River Rhine, and lured sailors to their doom. Tawdry work, but it got the job done. Time passed, then it was only me, singing lonely, sighing songs. Starving in the age of industry. Ugh. All things come to an end.

And there is always an encore.

I lose track of your wars, but this I noticed. Do you know the difference between a wall and a river? God makes one, and man the other. That’s about it, darling. I felt so at home.

Hast du etwas Zeit für mich,

Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich,

Von 99 Luftballons...

Oh, you know the rest.

Overnight, the barbed wire and concrete shot up. 1961...the end of a hot, languishing, when I was feeling—it’s true—old. But that stupid wall! So beautiful. So fresh! You should have seen the soldiers, all proud of their little twelve-foot Antifascistischer Schutzwall. Stringy wires hung up top—nice for lolling in the summer nights. Mmm, they lolled too. Bodies rolling, always drawn. How many in the end—150—170? You lose count. Climbing through wires, drowning in sewers, vaulting over no-go zones...it all adds up. Far more interesting than beguiled sailors in tiny ships.

Did they see me there, perched there for decades, hair flowing like rivers over the concrete? Oh maybe. Some. But those never lasted long.

I remember the first. You always do, love. A charming young man, Peter Fechter, the first year. He had a beautiful face. Climbed the wall and got so much farther than his friends. I smiled at him, and they shot him down in the street with their funny fast guns. He lay bleeding for an hour before he died.

Ida Siekmann was next. Threw her sheets out the window of her apartment and jumped after them toward, mmm, freedom. Died crushed on the cobblestones. She had beautiful blue eyes. Or Günter Liffin, right after, tried to swim to me through the River Spree. They forced him to swim back, then shot him in the back, aha. Strong chin, that one.

The very last one, oh, 1989-ish, Winny Freudenberg. Smart man, excellent beard. He really did fly a balloon across the Wall. He had a wife or something, and they wanted to escape. Flew like Icarus for a few hours before crashing back down in a delightful villa garden. Blood in the flowers.

Yes, the Wall fell—I’m not an idiot. Cheers and speeches. The whole cavalcade.  But I’m gonna do fine, love. I found the secret.

You see, there will always be walls. And now, I’ll be there. A small song on my lips. My hair flowing over the borders. Listen: I am the Lorelei, the last of the Sirens. And I love it. Because I will dine well forever.

And you, well. As they say. Auf Wiedersehen.

~~~

Tyler Lacoma is a writer and editor from Oregon. When he isn’t running his business, QuillandInk, Tyler works on creative nonfiction and fiction alike, always trying to get a little better. You can contact him @CaptainWords to learn more or to offer him an amazing book deal.