1st Place Winner – Flash 405, August 2026: “Quake”
Fiction
On the morning of the Nihoa quake, Ellen received a call to say that her mother had passed from pancreatic cancer. In her final days, she had refused to see Ellen. They had last spoken three days ago when Ellen called the hospital and her mother took the phone and muttered weakly: You have been a shit daughter. Goodbye. The quake was at 9:13 Pacific Daylight Time. Ellen was standing on the balcony of her Venice bedsit when it struck. She saw the ocean twist and shudder. She briefly lost her footing, though nothing fell off her open shelves. The hospital called at 9:23. At 9:29, as she was throwing clothes and assorted other items into her backpack, she saw an Instagram notification. Barry, her ex, had DMed all of her friends accusing her of selling child pornography. Separately, at 9:31, Barry messaged her: Come back to me, he wrote. If you don’t I am going to kill myself. Ellen did not believe in karma. She believed that things happened for no reason, and the question of whether someone was a saint or a pile of human shit was entirely up to them. At 9:41, as she waved down a cab on Pacific and 24th, Barry’s current wife messaged: You slut why are you sleeping with my husband? Slut bitch whore. At 9:45 her agent called to let her go—there was no call any more for primitive abstraction, everything was now metallurgy and organic sculpture. Ellen thanked her. At 9:47 she went online and made a reservation for the Getty. Then she looked out the window as the cab swung from the 10 onto the 405. There were no clouds above the city. The sky was a wide open spacious shade of blue. At the center she showed her ticket and walked out into the garden. She leaned against the white, gleaming wall and looked down, through binoculars, at the city below. The wave was swift and glorious. It was a fat blue eraser sweeping across a dirty gray page. She pulled out her water bottle and took a sip. All of you, she thought. You can fuck right off. She snapped a picture on her phone. Some moments are precious, she thought. Some moments are worth remembering.
Judge’s Comments: I love the concern with time and causality in this piece. We get a vivid portrait of our main character’s life through the sequential accounting of events and communication, and her response to the cataclysm feels cathartic and justified.
Bernard Steeds lives in New Zealand, where he has published one short story collection, won several national short story competitions, and appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Penguin New Zealand Anthology and The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories. He is a previous contributor to Exposition Review (Vols. IV and VII, and Flash 405: April 2022). He doesn’t wish a tsunami on anyone.
Photo by Tommy Bond