VirusImage

  • Short Short Fiction Contest

  • Submission Period: January 15-April 22 CLOSED
  • Fee: $10
  • First prize is $500, publication on our website, and a free issue of Fiction International.
    Second and third prize winners will be published on our website and receive a free issue of
    Fiction International. Please submit online through Submittable at  https://fictioninternational.submittable.com/submit

 

  • 2015 Theme: “Virus”

  • From biological entities to cultural memes to activist movements, viruses are everywhere. Submissions were exactly 300 words (not including the title).

  • First Place:
  • Andrea Witzke Slot, “Talking Trojans”
  • “Talking Trojans” melds compression, humor, keen intelligence, and social awareness into a savory 300 words. The references to Roland Barthes and his fetishization of language, especially his Lover’s Discourse, is cunning and comical. Where is the virus? Perhaps it is in the lover’s “discourse,” the language, however refined, which obscures the virulent spaces eroding between the words and all about us.
  • —Harold Jaffe, editor-in-chief, Fiction International

  • Second Place:
  • James D Ellis, “It Went Viral”

  • Third Place:
  • Adam O’Fallon Price, “Mulewhipper Blues”