Honorable Mention – Flash 405, April 2025: “Quitting”
Nonfiction
If you write for the editors, you will auction off your name just to hear it called. You will redact the paragraphs about sea monkeys and spray cheese, because it pays to be grim. You will waive the right to odd asides. You will achieve recognition but remain a missing person.
If you write for people, you will hot-glue your charms to the public wall. You will memorize their pulse at the price of your rhythm and blues. You will remember that the numerous prefer not to work up a sweat. You will provide them a flatline. You will neuter your vocabulary but catch yourself still checking for kittens.
If you write to make a point, you will clear the air but clog your windpipe. You will not find a chimney sweep deft enough to dislodge the jagged pieces. You will rip the embroidery off your airtight case. You will make people nod. You will be effective. You will cough all night because you had more to say, but it was as irrelevant as beauty.
Quit all that, and begin.
If you write from desperation, you will get to hock every costume of control. You will trip over your touchstones and run into the living and the dead. You will zipline gorges and stanzas without a helmet. You will not know the names of all the characters. They will know yours.
If you write from excess life, you will exasperate the armored. You will run afoul of rules no one remembers inventing. You will make dioramas with your own fingers, and the people will rise up and walk. You will give unexpected guests the giggles and still have more to give.
If you write for the bakery man who yells “Buongiorno!” you will not pluck out your golden raisins or golems, even though they are missing from the formal recipe. If you write for your small cousin who wears star stickers on her cheeks, you will not buzz-cut your exclamation points. You will build more than you could put together when you think of one face at a time.
If you write for the beggars who warm their hands under your ribs, you will never be alone. You will see your breath cut the cold and have a half-second chance to gulp it back. You will take their double dare instead. You will not expect what happens next, because the wind needs no permission.
Judge’s Comments:
I was delighted to find a craft piece among the contest entries, and about something as important as the audience of a writer’s words. As the lines between writers and content creators blur, we need to resist the tyranny of the content silo-and-funnel commodification. This piece tries to picture the “gentle reader” from an emotive, refined, and sensitive place of human connection. It imagines a playful and personalized taxonomy of readers, anathema to commercial audience segmentation. WAY to write a mini-essay in under 405 words.
Angela Townsend works for a cat sanctuary. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and trampset, among others. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College.
Photo by Matt Richmond