Tell Me Something Beautiful -- Submission Link

Here's the link; deadline tomorrow at midnight ( 15-Aug-2025 )

Well, well, well, we made it.

The link is below — but I wanted to say thanks for joining, and thanks for squaring my weekend and early week away with a bunch of beautiful, ordinary flash fiction.

My plan, I think, is to print them all off, sit out on the patio in the evenings, and read them with a coffee and a smoke.

That’s one of the benefits of these things, writer’s competitions, the reading and the writing. Sure, it’s great for you, hone the craft.

But it’s also an honour for me to read your stuff, no matter if you’re just starting out writing or if you’ve been doing it for years.

Cheers to you, and Good Luck.

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My own little piece ( that breaks the rules )

I hadn’t seen a hawk fly away with a mouse since I was about nine years old.

We lived in the country then, that’s what they call it when you can see the stars at night. Back behind our old house there, in the country, was a cornfield, and my brother and my friends and I would play Manhunt in there until our legs gave out. All around our house was hills and meadows, except the lots where other houses were being built, and we’d play capture the flag and cops and robbers.

We all had sticks and pocket knives and one of my friends had hunting dogs — Gus and Sheila — and a bow. We roamed the countryside, tracking deer and rabbit on the gully banks, and we would build forts and bury treasure.

One winter afternoon I walked the meadows alone, the whole world muffled white. I had my stick and my pocket knife, and was following the pitter-patter of mouse tracks in the snow. A neighbour across town had a roaming dog, a black-and-cream lab-husky mix named Tundra. She found me that day, and since we were both alone, she joined my side. I fed her half of my granola bar and pet her strong head.

Mice are pretty easy to track in the snow, four paw prints that press down in leaps every three to six inches, and a thin drag line where the tail runs between them. I followed that line and Tundra followed me.

We came to the top of a hill and a hawk rose from a thin stump of tree. Her dark wings sliced the pale winter air, and she circled once, then dropped fast into the field. When she came up the mouse I had been tracking hung there, limp in her talons. Tundra and I just watched the silent quickness of the kill, and I am sure she’s thinking, like me, it’s not all games out here.

Yesterday, at the running track, I saw it again. Another hawk, another mouse, but the same precision and the same sudden ending. And I thought about how long I had been following that drag line, thought about how sometimes the end just drops on you from the sky.

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Well, without further adieu, the submission link :