He/Him. Engineer, Husband, Father. Writer in the Northeast of England. Anti-AI. Kindness matters.
I don't reply to random DMs.
Reader for the Small Spec Book Awards.
Published here and there.
Linktr.ee/stevenpatchett
Steven Patchett
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🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈Queer Bookstore x Indie Horror pop-up!
It’s Portland Book Week and we’re teaming up with @alwaysherebooks.bsky.social tomorrow for an event showcasing Tenebrous’ LGBTQIA+ community!
4555 N. Williams Ave
Noon-4pm
Join us🖤☠️
🤣🤣🤣
FlashFlood: 'Pentecost' by Fiona J. Mackintosh #nffd2026
You've only got a couple days to pre-order and claim your koozie. Better get at it.
Had a fun time selling bewks today! Lots of Horror fans happened to be in the building and it was fun to talk spooky stuff. Everyone working at the Algonquin Barnes & Noble is super sweet too
Just one word turns this whole piece on its head. Masterful work.
All the fab flash you are reading were accepted by our hardworking FlashFlood editors. You can read more about them here: flashfloodjournal.blogspot.com/p/the-editor...
The Write-In: NFFD 2026 Prompt #8: Strange Connection #nffd2026
Pentecost
Tempera with Pencil on Panel, Andrew Wyeth, 1989
Absence is your gift, your singular talent. You’re the master of negative space, of erasures as sharp and precise as an exacto knife, leaving only a beached and rotting punt or mothy curtains at an open window. It’s the notion that stirs you when news comes of the girl who drowned off Pemaquid Point. No one knows if she was swept away or walked into the sea with pockets full of rocks, but you don’t stop to wonder if a lover harpooned her heart, flooding it with sorrow and despair. When you hear her body floated in with the tide, you don’t imagine the feelings of the men who pulled her from the water and laid her on the quayside, who had to smell the sour gape of her mouth and touch her purple skin and weed-shackled limbs. Nor do you question, for all the drownings they’ve seen, if this one was different, putting them in mind of the daughters their wives had borne them. As you take up your soft-hair brush, your yolky eggs, and powdered pigments, all you picture are the black spear shadows of the drying poles and the billow of the seine nets taking flight, yellow and spidered as ancient lace. Yet, somehow, when we look at the finished work, what you’ve done with your crosshatched strokes and careful pencil lines is to show us the very thing we cannot see – the dead girl lying on the empty stones.
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Fiona J. Mackintosh is the Scottish-American author of the a flash fiction collection The Yet Unknowing World (http:/adhocfiction.com). A past winner of the Fish, Bath, and Reflex Awards, her stories were selected for Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2019, Best Microfiction 2019, and the 2018-19 BIFFY50. www.fionajmackintosh.com.
Prompt #8: Strange Connection
Welcome to The Write-In! This year, we're celebrating the
2026 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology theme of Bridges. Throughout
National Flash Fiction Day, we'll be posting one prompt every hours from 00:00 until midnight (BST), for a total of 25 prompts in all. You
have until 23:59 BST on Sunday to submit your responses for
possible publication here at the Write-In over the course of the next week.
*
The word bridge gets used a lot as a metaphor. For this prompt, write a flash in which a bridge — an actual, physical, structural bridge — does something unexpected, means something unusual, or is used in a way bridges are not normally used.
To make this prompt extra challenging, the following are not allowed: a bridge as a suicide location, a bridge as the setting for a romantic proposal, the phrase 'build bridges', any bridge that collapses, etc. This is your invitation to some place new, strange, uncanny, off-kilter, silly or just plain weird!
*
If you’re submitting
this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt 8: Strange Connection.
You can submit responses until 23:59 BST on Sunday,
14 June 2026 for a chance to be published here at The Write-In.
You can claim the badge for this prompt by visiting our badges page.
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Photograph of the Golden Bridge with hand sculptures in Da Nang, Vietnam by Kirandeep Singh Walia via pexels.
dlvr.it
FlashFlood: 'Cheese Louise' by Chaz Osburn #nffd2026
Show me a screenshot of your INHALATION preorder receipt and I will mail you a free limited edition koozie. You'll be the envy of your pretentious bookish peers, as well as that one guy from your local dive bar who pees everywhere but *in* the toilet
FlashFlood: 'When my mother was at Lourdes' by Helen Kennedy #nffd2026
National Flash Fiction Day
“You’ll never guess what happened this afternoon, Louise.”
“Do tell.”
“I convinced someone to buy your book!”
“You mean, ‘What A Friend We Have In Cheeses?’”
“Yup.”
“No kidding?”
“Yes, I was at the bookstore and noticed a woman leafing through the pages. We started talking and… ”
“And?”
“I mentioned that we are friends and that you grew up in Cheshire and went to Derby to study to become a professional affineur...”
“Actually, it was the other way around. But then what happened?”
“She wanted to know if I had read it.”
“And?”
“I told her yes—that it is really Gouda!”
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The author of two novels, Chaz Osburn’s background is in the newspaper and magazine business and in PR. His short stories have been published in Amazing Stories, Sci-Fi Shorts, Bright Flash Literary Review, Alternative Liberties, Every Day Fiction and Altered Reality, among others. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan.
I got home from school early to find a woman sitting on the sofa with a detonator between her legs. Silk cut lips, sling backs and sugar spun hair. Her red dress tight like vocal chords. She laughed, a silly girl laugh, even though she was a grown up.
My father quickly buttoned up his shirt, to hide the moist shadow of his chest. He wiped the lipstick tint from his mouth. ‘Holy Mother of God,’ you’re back early,’ he said.
I remembered that I had seen the woman before, leaning up against the railway bridge, in a cloud of embassy smoke. My mother had said that women like her wouldn’t go to heaven.
My father’s eyes pleaded with me, before the bomb went off.
‘My Mammy’s gone to Lourdes with The Sisters of Mercy,’ I said. The woman stopped laughing then and reached for a cigarette, uncrossing her legs to reveal the pale white sheen of her thighs.
I wanted to tell her about the fungus that ate my mother’s breast, the musty, mottled tissues she hid in her bra cup.
My father got up and offered me an ice lolly from the freezer. I shook my head.
‘Do you believe in miracles?’ I said to the woman. ‘Mammy says they happen to good people.’
‘I do,’ the woman said and she smiled, an uncertain smile.
She reached out her arms and held the small wreckage of me in her arms. She wasn’t my mother then, but it didn’t matter.
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Helen Kennedy is a writer of short stories and flash fiction and has just completed a novel. @helenkennedywrites
