Writer, poet, storyteller living and working on unceded Kaurna Yerta, Adelaide, South Australia.
Pam Makin (she/her)
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Another very short piece. Write a story in exactly 15 words, they said. So I did.
This is one of three pieces I had accepted for The Write-In. This one was in response to Prompt #9: Single Crossing. “Write a flash using no word more than once, and yes, this includes small words like the, and, I, and is. The minimum word count is 75 words.”
Magic. Because @kathrynreese.bsky.social is a magician. 🌈👏⭐️
This is the second of (now five) pieces I’ve had accepted. This is the shortest and my personal favourite. It responds to Prompt 20 - “write the shortest possible flash that you can manage that spans all 26 letters of the alphabet: you must use each letter of the alphabet at least once.”
Dream Team! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
ICYMI: The Write-In: 'The Quick Brown Foxes' by Pam Makin #nffd2026
Stories famously have a beginning, a middle, and an end. So what do you with a prompt like this?
Prompt 24 - Last Crossing
Write a microfiction of no more than 50 words about an ending that is also a beginning.
I did this:
Last to be posted but the first I submitted. Seems fitting.
The prompt: Write a flash of no more than 100 words that starts and ends with the same sentence. The opening and closing sentence should feel different in meaning by the time we return to it.
Thanks @natflashfictionday.bsky.social
The Write-In: 'When I Was Seven' by Sumitra Singam #nffd2026
The Write-In: 'The God of Unwanted Children' by Kathryn Reese #nffd2026
When I Was Seven, My Mother Told Me …
We were baptised in incense and droning Sanskrit, sandstone pillars holding us up and our sense of duty - boys lead and work and manage and girls cook and clean and serve. The idols plump, voluptuous, sated, watched with fish eyes as we wended our womanly ways. Choice was not one of the options - we were tied in place by six yards of silk folding and pleating us into submission.
… God Is Everywhere
She came to me in a dream, Shakti sitting on a tiger. There was a pounding in my chest and all my ribs cracked open like an eggshell and she burst out of it. She said the temple is just a building I live in your heart I am your heart you have always been this brave this full of love you have work to do but it is not in the kitchen my daughter my friend - look up from the ground, see the way the stars point. Mount your tiger. It is time.
The god of unwanted children herself grew up wild, breasts bursting out from a t-shirt, face slapped for defiance or an insistence on climbing trees then hanging upside down. There’s always escape but nowhere to go, no food, only fruit stolen, skin ripped with thumbnail, not-quite-ripe acid souring that belly, heat rash prickling at unwashed neck. She’ll take you in, share everything: smokes, coin, threadbare blanket, lice, kisses, rage. Spin stories past belief, long beyond bedtime, gathering kids forgotten like her, me worshipping those star-fire eyes.
The Write-In: 'Wet Season Lament' by Sumitra Singam and Kathryn Reese #nffd2026
The Write-In: 'Luck Goes Both Ways' by Pam Makin #nffd2026
The Write-In: 'The Quick Brown Foxes' by Pam Makin #nffd2026
The Write-In: 'My story is a cliché you say is best avoided' by Kathryn Reese #nffd2026
I start in the monsoon when the river was swollen with silt and the debris of broken tea trees, crushed lantana and the dropped unripe fruit the orchard shed before the seed could be viable.
I am carried with the flood, fingernails crescents of mud, swept into sidestreams that do not bear any name, and my skin sloughs off, my own name silt in the riverbed.
My babies, too, driftwood children, submerged, emerging, finding lodging in the rock then working their way loose, twisting like a compass needle, yearning not for north but for sea.
Can I call them babies if I did not birth them, but merely allowed them to fall from my pelvis, ignored sloughings, the detritus of meaningless life?
What if I let them subsist on whatever they could grasp and they grew up half-salt, half-scavenged sugar and just a little fish?
Perhaps a line will hook them, give them meaning through a swift blow, gutting, scaling, guts thrown to their brothers.
Perhaps they will find themselves homed in mangrove muck or in some amphibious god’s estuary haven.
My dreams mean nothing - children propel themselves on their own tides, breathe their own air.
Listen: the thunder is summoning the drenching, that storm’s coming for the mountains again.
The river in spate, I swim helpless, rainsick, to the source.
That was it! Science is 90% monotony, 10% luck, and this was my lucky day. The answer was staring up from beneath the microscope. It was obvious now, in the sketches, the equations. All alone in the lab, I could keep it quiet until I published.
I didn’t know the committee existed until I was summoned to defend myself. A hearing of the Rosalind Franklin Integrity Committee was asking me about the process leading to the discovery. I didn’t say “I found a notebook beside a microscope and had an epiphany.” But they knew anyway. That was it.
Pride month writing workshop, your hair in braids, your singlet-shirt revealing scents of sandalwood soap and saltwater. Queerness is not a thing you discover in the mud, it’s in you, it’s always been—
except that I’ve just spent three days in the scrub, cataloging frog calls and evading the thirst of terrestrial leeches.
When I was 12, I caught chicken pox. I remember shivering in my grandmother’s bed, pedestal fan whirring, starched sheets scratching at calamine-bathed skin. Being sent to bathe, water tinted yellow with pine tar, the stench lingering in my hair for months. Not being allowed out, except to go to the park, as long as
I promise I won’t go near anyone.
But there was something in the stopped-up creek, the wonga-vine’s embrace, or the way the strangler fig poured herself into another tree’s torso—
I promise I won’t go near anyone
because I was a church-girl then, believing that love is proportionate to purity, and purity a thing so easily undone.
I promise I won’t—
This place won’t forget what she is told, even as she teaches me to kiss honey from fallen flowers. She would have loved me
but holiday love and quarantine end. At the bidding of god, my parents say, we relocate to some red-dust mining town. Make the best of it. I stick with the first boy to pick me. Love is
proportionate to purity after all. I play it safe. Lucky things worked out but there you are in sandalwood and a singlet-shirt saying I’ve always been whole and holy and I tell you no—
I’m three-days deep in the scrub by my grandmother’s house, leech-scarred, mud-stained and bearing the sap of wonga vine in my hair. And if you kiss me
you will taste another girl’s honey in my hair.
Although nobody accepted the fact, Nancy is single by choice. She chooses her life, along with everything about it, deliberately. No man, or woman come to that, could possibly meet this exacting standard. Dating remains uninteresting, even after decades on apps. Matchmakers tried but they ran out of options. Clairvoyants searched crystal balls. Nothing! Until Tom strutted past one sunny morning, demanding attention, affection, food. Poor Nance fell truly, madly deeply in love. These two are a typical couple now – spinster and cat.
dlvr.it
Newspapers are insulating on a cool night. Whatever the news, fold a broadsheet in quarters, it fits snuggly across a chest. This evening’s headline reads THE QUEEN IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING. Emotionless faces glow in the light from smartphones. There is so little warmth in this digital age.
