by Jaime Gill
Honorable Mention – Flash 405, February 2026: “Oops”
Fiction
We found her on day 47.
Everything leading up to the discovery was predictable toil. The flight to Moscow, two excruciating days verifying permits, a long-haul to Yakutsk, then a shuddering skiplane that dumped us near the megafauna graveyard.
Glittering white nothing stretched around us. I’d been before but this view still awed me in the true sense. I feared it. It made me feel miniscule and meaningless.
Keselekova had joined two previous expeditions, but Javorsky was an Arctic virgin. I warned him how quickly frostbite moves on exposed skin. He asked about bears.
“Don’t worry about those,” I said. “There’s a deadlier enemy out here.”
“Boredom,” Keselekova said. “Paint dries faster than permafrost melts.” I’d forgotten she knew my best lines.
By day we searched and mapped the area. During dazzle-white evenings we played cards and battled insomnia. Time bleached out.
Until we found her, deep in the ice.
I’d dreamt of a saber-toothed tiger, but she was even better—human. She’d make us Slovakia’s most famous scientists.
We pried her from her ice grave. Her skin was black-mottled and grotesquely swollen.
“Warned you about frostbite,” I said to Javorsky.
We hauled her back to camp and drank celebratory slivovice. We were slurry and sleepy before we’d finished the bottle. A climate thing, I foggily thought, as we crawled towards our sleeping bags.
How many hours later was it when Keselekova shook me awake, sobbing that Javorsky was sick? I stumbled over, my own head pounding. Javorsky was choking, lymphs satsuma-sized.
“Radio for help.”
As Keselekova called, I searched for something to stop Javorsky choking, until my eyesight fuzzed. I turned to Keselekova, but she’d collapsed. Her outstretched fingers were frostbite-black.
Except … she’d worn gloves. She wasn’t a fool.
No. I was.
Keselekova wasn’t frostbitten. Neither was Solisko. Even as I sank into delirium, I grasped the enormity of my mistake.
I snapped awake again to a helicopter sound: whup-whup-whup. I grabbed the radio but couldn’t remember how to use it. I stumbled outside and waved my arms in warning, but the exertion overwhelmed me. I tumbled into white heaven.
I woke to find a nurse changing my IV. Memories crashed over me. I roared “Stay away!” and the nurse leapt back.
But it was too late. Responders. Flight crew. Doctors. Some would have already gone home, feeling under the weather.
Yersinia pestis—the Black Death was back.
Judge’s Comments: From its first line, this piece set the stakes and drew me in. The narrator walks us through a devastating nightmare in which they are powerless to change the final outcome, wielding tension and suspense throughout.
Jaime Gill is a British writer working for nonprofits in Southeast Asia. He has no pets or children, but is keeping a few houseplants alive, just about. He writes, reads, runs, boxes, and occasionally socializes. His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Forge, The Sun Magazine, trampset, fractured lit, and Pithead Chapel. He’s won multiple awards, including a Bridport Prize and the 2025 Luminaire Prose Award, and been a finalist for the Tennessee Williams Prize and Bath Short Story Award. He’s also a three-time Pushcart nominee. He’s currently writing a novel, screenplay, and yet more short stories. Website: www.jaimegill.com. Newsletter: jaimegill.substack.com.
Photo by Kristaps Ungurs