The July 2026 Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction challenged writers to create an original piece of fiction of no more than 500 words.
Entrants chose a team and three prompts to address in their story.:
TEAM AMANDA (YIN):
- Word: MOON
- Action: CONCEALING SOMETHING
- Kicker: Write a story inspired by YIN ENERGY.
TEAM ED (YANG):
- Word: SUN
- Action: REVEALING SOMETHING
- Kicker: Write a story inspired by YANG ENERGY.
The competition drew 297 entries from around the world looking for a slice of the AU$4,000 prize money. That’s 144,050 words for our judges, Ed, Amanda, Elise and Dean, to read. For reference, that’s about the same number of words as ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak.
For more fascinating statistics about the competition, and to get behind-the-scenes details of the judging process, check out the Longlist Announcement – July 2026 Not Quite Write Prize episode of the podcast at the link below.
To hear the winning and shortlisted entries read aloud by Ed and Amanda, check out the Winner and Shortlist Announcement – July 2026 Not Quite Write Prize episode of the podcast at the link below.
WINNER – TEAM ED
SANDWORM by Steve Huff
Twenty-one years of training, hoping, yearning. Tonight is my big night.
I’m ready. Feet on the blocks. Hand wraps on. Poised to dive, you might say. Almost too ready, but let’s not dwell on that.
That’s Ben’s fault. Ben is my life support system, and so far he’s done a piss-poor job of putting me to my intended use.
Oh sure, there’s porn—endless gyrating, squelching flesh pits behind the glass of that radiation-spewing device he keeps cavalierly close to me and my co-workers. Porn ‘til I’m chafed red as a lobster, hangdog with inadequacy next to those purple-veined pythons that twitch and bob of their own accord, still sniffing the air in pursuit of damselly morsels long after I’ve beaten a shrivelled retreat to my poly-blend prison.
Dude, I want to say. Guy. Bro. A few hundred years ago you’d have had three kids by now, working on a fourth. It’s not meant to be this hard.
But no, he’d rather listen to the guys with surgically-enhanced jawlines and pharmaceutically-embiggened deltoids marching down his feed in inevitable, dreary procession. Apparently his inability to make the basic connection that every one of his ancestors managed for the last 1.2 billion years of sexual dimorphism is… entirely not his fault. It’s those damned women, freed from a natural state of dependence by hormonal birth control and almost-equal pay, so they can flock in glassy-eyed harems around the feet of a few towering Chads. This winner-take-all dystopia Ben confidently refers to as the Chadopoly.
You don’t want to know what he calls the women.
I want to be long and girthy enough to slap him. No, dude—not the enemy. Not. The. Enemy.
Case in point: Margot. Bless her slightly gap-toothed, nervous, hoodie-wearing soul.
She apparently got tired of just-happening to sit near Ben in every statistics tutorial, smiling, “accidentally” brushing his hand. So she invited him back to her campus share house for pizza, refusing to accept indecision. Then when he absolutely failed to take the hint, despite me doing my best to bounce up and down and scream, she pulled him in for a beer-and-garlic, teeth-bumping, awkward, incredible kiss.
I was so proud then, the way he looked at her. What have I been trying to tell you, kid?
Give him time to get used to the idea, he may even realise they’re people.
But right now, in her room, her hand slowly unbuttoning his fly, it’s my time.
And here I am.
Modest in proportion, pale as any sunless creature, yes, but in spirit a sandworm bursting from the dunes of Arrakis, sans teeth. Jörmungandr breaking from the waves, no tail to bite.
Yes, oh yes.
And there they are: fingertips. Soft, warm. Oh, warmer than I ever imagined. And then those treacherous nuts twitch.
Oh no.
Not yet. Oh, not yet, you morons! You hairy troglodytes! This is my time. I clench, gritting imaginary teeth.
You.
Shall.
Not.
Pass.
Then the soft, warm hand closes around me.
Aw, Christ…
SECOND PLACE – TEAM AMANDA
WHAT WE LOST AND ALL WE GAINED by Tatum Schad
We waited every day for the moon to fall apart.
It happened slow. The sprouting fissure was hundreds of miles across, but from earth it only looked like a scratch. Our beloved satellite with a crack in its face.
The tides maintained their usual tug-of-war at first. When the moon dimmed to a crescent, we often forgot about the whole thing altogether, like we’d traveled back in time.
Then the gap widened.
As the moon separated into distinct halves, you did your best to snap me in two.
I sat on the porch with your father, binoculars in hand, waiting for our fractured friend to rise above the horizon so we could see for ourselves what hubris really looked like. You’d twist and push against my belly so hard it sent ripples across my skin. Your father, wanting to be part of the action, couldn’t keep his hands off it. He swooned every time you nudged him back, but I still felt bad he’d never know you like I did, the same way I felt bad you’d never see your first birthday.
We refused to tell anyone the name. Some of the more savvy family members sensed our wish for privacy and gave us names instead. Ancestral matriarchs, verbs turned into nouns, creative spellings and unreasonable suffixes. We said we’d add them to the shortlist, then switched topics to the doomsday clock infographic wired into every phone and screen.
Funny, these two cataclysms happening at the same time. I learned motherhood is having the moon explode above you and thinking about the limb poking the inside of your belly button instead.
I always pictured an elbow.
My water broke the day the tides broke their reliable pattern and ravaged the world. We watched news reports of mass flooding and death tolls while I labored, begging someone to change the channel before the real contractions started.
I only had room for one Earth-shattering event in my life. I couldn’t devote any more energy to the rest.
Two weeks later, the moon lost its orbital equilibrium and gravity lassoed it toward us.
We sent out birth announcements anyway, finally sharing your name with the nearly extinguished world, and spent every precious second watching you exist. You had your dad’s nose, my smile, a befuddling amount of filled diapers, and a coo that sounded like heaven on Earth. We hardly put you down, often holding you until you slept, afraid to rest ourselves and risk sleeping through Armageddon.
When it finally came, we cuddled up on the porch as a family of three, and took it in.
I held you and your father held me as the cool night air buzzed around us. My heart pounded, but I saw your face aglow in the light of the approaching moon, and thanked the universe for such a blessing.
To think we came so close to missing it.
THIRD PLACE – TEAM ED
SUNSCAPE by Natalie Harris
On the morning that he goes blind, Thomas Broadswell stares at his copy of Van Gogh’s The Sower at Sunset one last time.
The mug in his hands is hot, the coffee robust as he drags it to his lips. Whorls of bitter steam flow seamless into the dashes that pepper the oil-thick sky of Van Gogh’s hope. White glimmers draw the eye to feed into rich gold, and below the sower’s feet, the sea of blue and purple undulates in perfectly contrasting composition.
The painting is a masterpiece.
Or, it would be, if not for the star of the show.
She is carved into the canvas with the rough centrifugal motion of hard graphite. She is painted in thick, unwieldy splats of yellow, like a toddler stole the master’s brush to ruin the splendour of his cognisance.
In reality, she is not nearly so ugly.
Thomas places the mug down beside his latest palette. Flaking paint hits his nostrils in a burn of chemicals. The Size 6, nudged lightly, rolls to the edge where it teeters for a moment, precarious, caught between the decision to stay where it’s supposed to, or fall haphazard into a sea of unforgiving blue and purple.
His fingers flex, the joints popping.
Thomas turns, sweeping into the kitchen. His slippers clap on the heavy marble as he surveys the quiet kingdom through his window. Mist roves over the grass like a regiment of spectres. The sky is crisp and cloudless, the fiery orange of sunrise bubbling up to meet the fragments of lilac night like activated lava.
Thomas breathes out thin, his heart constricting.
The conditions are finally perfect.
He takes the Jovantic to the viewing platform, then spends 45 minutes calibrating the lens and the sun filter, his hands trembling. Dew films the body of his equipment in moments, the droplets providing a prismatic glimpse of the truth.
He runs still quivering fingers through the thinning tickle at his temples as she finally makes her grand entrance. The world enhances, coming to life in the sumptuous flex of ultra-radiation.
Thomas’s heart hammers. The scent of cooking vegetation sharpens like the chemical burn of paint as he bends to peer into the eyepiece. The newly vitalised world holds its breath.
At first, he sees craters, sunspots, the corona, and the disrupted ripples of gases. She is as perfectly round as Van Gogh’s centrifugal representation. Through the filter, she holds a singular dark terracotta taint, like a toddler has stolen the master’s paintbrush…
Thomas’s throat closes. The corners of his eyes prickle.
Surely there is more to her than this.
If he is to paint her, truly paint her, then he will settle for nothing but her glorious truth. He leans back, eyes tracing the vibrancy of those dew drops. The Size 6 wavers over the edge.
Thomas’s fingers skim the tabbed tip of the filter.
The truth is that it takes exactly 0.6 seconds for his retinas to burn.
FOURTH PLACE – TEAM AMANDA
HEARTS WITH AUDREY by Jesse Dascanio
Let her have it the way she wants, you say as we pull into your mother’s driveway. Together, for the first time. Your hand is on my leg, a lid over boiling water. This is a lot for her. Just don’t be too…
How can you be thirty-six years-old, and she’s never used the word ‘gay’? It keeps the peace, you’d shrugged. Not long ago, I’d been venomous about it: You’ve been a faggot all your life. She needs to grow up. I suppose this meeting counts, finally.
Jeremy, I tell her. But she knows me. A shadow that was always just out of sight, but maybe never out of mind.
She’s handed you mail with both our names on it when it’s come to her PO box. Remember back when you’d still take her your laundry? We accidentally put my small jocks in with your large ones, and she gave them back—washed and pressed—without a word.
I’ve stood right here, in her persimmon-scented lounge room, many times. Not once with her in it. Just the ugly wicker furniture and the slowly fading photos of your dad. I don’t remember his name.
You eat salmon, don’t you, Jeffrey? is the sole question I merit all evening. No, and it’s Jeremy. When you don’t correct her, I say Absolutely, and let her have it the way you want. Forever keeping the peace.
So, I sit nicely as the pair of you steer around me like an iceberg. Concealing what’s just beneath the water. She loves Kinky Boots, but I mustn’t mention I’ve starred as Lola.
The cards come out at last. When you told me your Christmas tradition was Hearts, I spent the week watching every YouTube video I could about this stupid game. Beside the deck, a yellowed and curled piece of paper with a three-person tally. “J” must be your dad. His column hasn’t seen a pencil stroke in a long while.
Her hand disappears back into the drawer to find the cards that get set aside when it’s just two people. Those are covered in dust.
In Hearts, you’re meant to try and pass your bad cards to somebody else. But, if you take and keep every single one, you win the game instead.
The old woman plays fast. It’s the only half hour of the night where she looks like she’s enjoying herself. I take all the shit. Queen of spades. Then, the hearts. One after another, loading my gun.
We’re on the final trick. I put down nine of hearts. She plays the ten.
Trying to ‘shoot the moon’, Jeff? It was a nice try.
Underneath the table, you put your hand on my leg again. And, fuck, I let her have it.
FIFTH PLACE – TEAM AMANDA
BUNYIP by Ryan Nonome
“Watch out, Bunyip’ll get ya, if you turn your back to the creek!” you told me.
It was so hot. And the mudbanks had a stink to them. At least the flies were busy somewhere else.
“Ghosts aren’t real,” I said, watching you dangle from a branch, stretching to grab the frayed rope swing. “You monkey idiot.”
You danced on the branch and made stupid chimp noises and I looked at my feet so you couldn’t see me smile.
“Well, the Bunyip isn’t a ghost. It’s a demon. Uncle Jim said so,” you said.
Uncle Jim’s stories always gave me butterflies. The idea of a demon in our creek got them all flapping about again.
I heard the familiar groaning of branch and rope — grrrrkk then splash. I checked to see if that damn rope had finally snapped, but it held, barely, as it always did, and you popped up with a big smile, and you laughed. You laughed like you knew — you were so certain there was no such thing as the Bunyip, and even though your splashing and laughing seemed like the only noise for miles, you didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“Have a swing, B!” you called.
The water was murky brown. I checked my legs for leeches.
“No thanks. Y’know there’s probably a hundred-and-fifty leeches on you right now?”
“Mhmm — it’s my sweet blood. I’m like Fanta to them,” you said, then you duck-dived with your pants down, mooning me. I couldn’t help but laugh. Mum always said you were too busy being a fool to feel afraid.
You swam past doing backstroke to the creekside with the swinging tree. I ignored you and turned back to my mud towers. I grabbed a handful of wet sandy muck, and let it dribble out the bottom of my fist. It was so quiet that I could hear the plip plip as the droplets fell on top of each other, building a little mud staircase, up and up, until grrrrkk — splash, in you went again.
My tower collapsed from beneath and oozed back towards the creek. I couldn’t get any to stay up. It was like the mud was being called back to the water.
I picked up another handful.
plip
plip
The birds and fish and even the insects were gone. Everything was so still except the muck slipping through my fingers.
All I heard were those wet drips. I didn’t notice you were still too.
And I know I told you I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I didn’t know about demons. About the Bunyip.
What else but the Bunyip could hypnotise me like that? And snap the rope that never broke? And hold you down, the best swimmer in Kedleigh, and fill your lungs with mud. And then vanish, and watch from the bushes as the birds came back and I came back too. And laugh probably, as I found you with your skin all blue. Your skin was so blue.
SIXTH PLACE – TEAM ED
MARRIED TO THE SEA by Andrea Cavedo
“When grain gets wet, growth immediately starts, not only in the grain itself, but in the mould spores, yeast cells, and bacteria which are always present, causing germination, fermentation and putrefaction.” This, from the BMT Cargo Solutions Handbook. You couldn’t find a more apt metaphor for my marriage.
First, grain gets wet. I assumed Brandy was joking when she sloshed up at the dockside bar to say, “Let’s make a baby.” Why not. I was on shore leave then, Third Mate. I skipped my promotion to Second when she texted me a photo of two pink lines in a plastic window. A porthole view of our future. Germination.
I dry-docked. Seven months in, svelte as ever, Brandy’s sweetness burned off when her lie finally surfaced. Turns out the things I was supposed to want—a wife, a child—were just fizz. Fermentation.
I fled here to think. To avoid putrefaction.
The Largesse is a handymax-class bulk carrier: five cargo bays full of hard red winter wheat, four cranes, three accommodations tiers stacked under the bridge like a mid-rise apartment block, two dozen crew, one of whom is me. And within me, one heart, two lungs, three months of salt. We’re only four nautical miles from port. But we’ve been sitting, anchored, for five weeks, off the north bank of the strait.
It’s hot enough to scald eyeballs and scorch skin, even through the deck’s pebbled red oxide paint. We yearn for movement, for progress. We’re stultifying in geopolitical doldrums. Ripening.
I caught Chef caressing his lettuce leaves in the galley. I saw the bosun rubbing himself like a rutting elk against a far-aft vent tube. I get it.
Everything about this vessel lights me up, too: the ribbed walls of the cargo bays, the stiff upward swing of the cranes. The leathery folds of the immersion suit we are required to try on during safety training. Slipping and bumping into it on the first day was only foreplay. There are oarlocks, air hoses, nozzles of all kinds. Coils and spools of cunt-spliced ropes, as true to their namesake as Brandy is to hers. The tang of rust in the air below decks stirs the iron in my own blood.
I can’t explain it. Nor could I explain why it felt like the popcorn ceiling of our bedroom was pressing down on me every night, flattening me into the percale sheets, drowning me under decorative pillows and wilted expectations.
On the deck of the Largesse, there is no ceiling at all. The skies never end. The sea stretches so taut against the horizon its edges buckle. I love to watch our parting wake, the endless unfolding of foamy blue. When we come into port in the predawn, when the pink clouds touch the green glow of the dock lights, it’s like being inside the aurora borealis. Inside a budding flower.
I’ll airmail the divorce papers as soon as we dock. I have been unfaithful, but not to Brandy. And I’ll never stray again.
LONGLISTED
TEAM ED
- DOUBLE DARE by Ben Daggers
- THE DOORFRAME by Sam James
- A BROKEN PROMISE. by Varda Tully
- FINAL DEPARTURE by Michelle Ryan
- UMOONASAURUS by Sara Banda
- IN BLOOM by Saskia Carla
- THE TIME MY DAUGHTER CAME OUT TO ME IN THE PLUMBING AISLE AT BUNNINGS by Julia Knoef
- BLEACHED BONES AND CREOSOTE RESIN by Autumn Bettinger
- UNBROKEN STONE by Dez Veares
TEAM AMANDA
- NOW, WE EAT by S Terese
- CROOKED ANSWERS by Brandon Woo
- ONCE HE STOPS THROWING UP, EDDIE VEDDER AND I ARE GOING TO BE ALRIGHT by Emily Rinkema
- A PONY CALLED PICKLE by A. C. Stewart
- ALL OF A SUDDEN, SUDDENLY, AND ALL AT ONCE by Chloe Paige
- BORROWED, LIKE THE MOON by Taurenelle
- IN THIS VERSION OF MY LIFE by Brielle Bates
- THE MOON, SHE SEES MY SOUL by Athena Law
- LITTLE TREATS by Kathryn Cook
- CLEAN EDGES, SWEET WITH ROT by J.J. Silkwood
- THE MAN AT THE TABLE by Tommy Baker
- THE SHAME OF HOT RUBBER MELTING (BETWEEN MY LEGS). by W.J.Arthur
- THE CELESTIAL RESCUE NEAR THE METROPOLITAN BOROUGH OF OLDHAM by Jonathan Dawson
- EARTHRISE, 2168 by Thorgeir Wintermere
- THE SIDE WE CAN’T SEE by J.R. Biffin
- TRAINS AT DEPARTURE by paolo dgl
- 400KMS TO KAL by Jessica Elsea
- CORN FLOUR SYNDROME by Sarah Kennedy
- PHASES by Chad Frame
- TRINKET IN A TIN by Michael Stone
- SOMETIMES TO-DO LISTS ARE COMPLETED by Rananda Rich
- THE LOVERS by James Fitzroy
- LIKE A LULLABY, LIKE A DIRGE by Carson Costa
- THE DONKEY & THE MONK by Jane Stecyk
- MIDNIGHT POUTINE by Sandra Peters
ADDITIONAL AWARDS
- BROKEN DREAMS AND BUTTERFLY CAKES by Jo Skinner *WILDCARD WINNER*
- FINAL DEPARTURE by Michelle Ryan *WILDCARD WINNER*
- AND I’LL NEVER TELL YOU by Josh Lowe *WILDCARD WINNER*
- MEMORY RATIONS by Tracy Mingo *WILDCARD WINNER*
- THE HISTORIC BATTLE AT TADCASTER OF SIR DAVID AND THE RIVER SERPENT IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1351 by Holly Sadowski *DISHONOURABLE MENTION*
Congratulations to our longlisted and prize-winning authors, and many thanks to ALL entrants for sharing your creative talents with us.
We hope you stay tuned to the podcast and write on!