Quarterly Micro-fiction Competition Winners
Many thanks to all the writers who continue to submit to Superlative.
Here are the micro-fiction pieces we have selected as the winners in our quarterly competition.
If you would like us to consider your prose, please submit here.
Enjoy!
If You Try to Get a Pony
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Of course it’s me. No one else has the same dumb haircut. No one else’s mother would cut the same dumb haircut. It all started when Jane wanted a pony.
Jane wanted a pony, then a submarine. Then she needed a working time machine. And our parents would do it. In theory. They wouldn’t exactly get the pony, the submarine, or the time machine, but they’d open the door and wait. “Maybe something will happen,” they’d say. “Someone could bring a pony, a submarine, or a time machine. Yes, anything’s possible.”
One day, something did happen, and his name was Mr. Frank. Mr. Frank became a regular guest for the whole month of April. He knew all the board games and card games, and he’d wake us up to play with him.
My little brother Johnny didn’t like that at all. He hated it so much that he’d cry and cry ‘til one day Mother grabbed Johnny by his diaper and threw him out the window into the alleyway.
We were not to go see him, so Johnny was left to fend for himself. Some kid said he saw Johnny by the ballfield, but I doubt it. Ballfield’s miles away. I like to think a nice old lady has him, and she feeds him peaches and soft ham.
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Velvet, our black and white pussy cat, used to circle Mr. Frank like it was looking for something. The cat was smart because I think it saw Mr. Frank looking up at my mother’s underwear. Yes, Mother had washing on the line, and Mr. Frank spent way too long giving it a good gaze. But I guess she shouldn’t have let it out there when it was pitch dark like that. But maybe Mr. Frank wasn’t looking after all.
Mr. Frank had this special trick: Trip Your Uncle was the name. Mr. Frank would sit on his one leg in this funny way so the other leg stuck out, and whenever Father would go by, he’d stumble on Mr. Frank’s foot, and Mr. Frank would say “Trip Your Uncle.” Mother would laugh and laugh. Mr. Frank liked that the best. Sure, he liked us kids okay, but Mother was his favorite.
After a couple weeks, Mr. Frank started bringing Mother flowers and mint sticks, strawberry wafers and honey. There was this idiot-looking cap he brought, saying it belonged to a prince. Mother wore the thing until every last hair fell out. From the cap. It was fur.
Eventually, Mr. Frank got handsy, and Father had to ask him to go. Mr. Frank then asked if Father could go instead. Father thought about it, then said yes, he’d go under one condition: “Find a damn pony so you can shut the damn door.”
Mr. Frank found a pony. Then we shut the door. But it cost us everything. Except for the scissors.
And she uses them. Mother, that is. She uses them.
For the haircuts.
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​​By Kelsey Austin​
Kelsey Austin is a writer of plays, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. She earned her MA in Literature: Theatre and Drama at Essex University in Colchester, England. Kelsey’s plays have been developed through residencies and staged readings across the United States. Her short fiction appears in The Closed Eye Open, Half and One, and Bending Genres. Kelsey’s creative flash nonfiction is soon to appear in Wild Roof Journal. Her flash fiction is forthcoming in NUNUM’s Done in a Hundred anthology. Kelsey’s debut chapbook of flash fiction, 'Domestic Disturbances', is out now through Bottlecap Press.
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Website: www.kelseyjaustin.com
Instagram: @kelseyjaustin
Facebook: Kelsey Austin
The Bar Fight Gambit
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Another game, my start. I play the safest of openings: king’s pawn, two forward.
Ben’s turn next. I pause, like him. The metronome ticks away on the train carriage’s rickety little table. It’s two decades since he first argued that the metronome helped him reach the same focused headspace he achieved laying down basslines in studios. I suspected he hoped to distract me, but never complained, as the much stronger player. Ben said that was because I had a scientist’s brain, while his was artistic. Excuses, excuses.
My concentration drifts. I peer out at the relentless frosted forest the train’s sweeping through. I understood Russia’s vastness in theory, but the Trans-Siberian’s taught me more than any atlas could. Five timezones in three days, with three more timezones and two days before reaching Irkutsk—my great-grandmother’s home town.
Back to the board. Ben’s next move’s not sensibly symmetrical. His pawn lunges at mine. I once told him this was the Scandinavian Gambit. He called it the Bar Fight Gambit after that—always be first to throw a punch.
I hesitate briefly, trying to remember what should happen next (tick-tock, the metronome nags), then take his pawn. He punched first, but I drew first blood.
The forest briefly gives way to a spectral vista of tundra, white steppes rippling like a frozen ocean. Ben and I promised we’d do this trip nineteen years ago, right after Jenny’s birth. Having children certainly makes you realise how you squandered your former freedom.
Next, Ben’s knight leaps out, challenging my lonely pawn—he always liked fast, scrappy games. The only kind he could win.
I’m making my next move when the train shudders so hard the chess pieces jiggle, then howls to a halt.
I peer out, expecting some industrial nowhere-town, but there’s only more pine and snow.
I’m refocusing on the game when the flustered provodnitsa guard wrestles the carriage door open and speaks to me in Russian simple enough for a five-year-old. She’s got my number.
“Please move. Problem track.” She points below. “Please go next carriage. We fix.”
She’s turning, when she spies the board.
“You play alone?”
I nod.
“Why?”
I could explain that I’m recreating a game I once played on another train in another country with my husband, our four-year-old asleep in his lap. I’ve never understood my memory—I often misplace keys, but remember good chess games near-perfectly. This one particularly, because Ben actually checkmated me with an inspired two-bishop crossfire.
But no, the provodnitsa already thinks I’m a madwoman, travelling alone.
“It’s fun.” And it is, though a complicated kind. All fun is complicated now. If Ben had lived just two more years, he’d be here to surprise me with a wild new move.
The last time I called Jenny, she asked me to stop holding so hard onto memories. She doesn’t understand that I’m getting older and fear losing them forever.
The provodnitsa shrugs, then gestures to follow. I do, stilling the metronome’s heartbeat as I leave.
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​​By Jaime Gill​
Jaime Gill is a British former music journalist, now working for nonprofits across Southeast Asia. He writes, reads, runs, boxes, and occasionally socialises. His stories have appeared in Missouri Review, The Forge, Sun Magazine, Trampset, Fractured, Pithead Chapel, and others. He’s won multiple awards, including a 2024 Bridport Prize and the 2025 Luminaire Prose Award, and been a finalist for the Tennessee Williams Prize and Bath Short Story Award. He’s a three-time Pushcart nominee. No pets or children, but he’s keeping a few houseplants alive, just about. He’s writing a novel, screenplay, and more short stories.
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Website: www.jaimegill.com
Newsletter: jaimegill.substack
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