June 2026
Ten stories picked by Cole Beauchamp
Cole Beauchamp is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Monarch and Best Microfiction. She’s a 2026 SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow and contributing editor of New Flash Fiction Review. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children.
Bluesky: @nomad-sw18.bsky.social
If you aren’t familiar with her work, here’s one of her pieces to start things off:
Between Lessons, The Girls Purchased As Concubines Play Leapfrog (Cole Beauchamp | Gooseberry Pie Lit Mag)
Why I like it (MK): I’m a sucker for a long title, especially when that title is doing multiple things as it is here - intriguing, layering, and anchoring a reader in time, place and scenario. The piece that follows continues to sparkle from there. There’s a surrealness to all of this, and so much bubbling away underneath the surface layer. The writing is both detached in terms of POV and fully immersive in the inclusion of sensory detail like “a low-burn friction”. That wonderful final image is one that sticks with me.
For this month’s collection of stories, Cole has picked the theme of games as a way of telling a story slant. Cole comments that in May, “Erin Vachon did a month of prompts around games for SmokeLong Fitness and it was a great stretch. Kudos to them for starting me down this track!”
Alfred Untold (Neil Clark | Jellyfish Review)
Why I like it (CB): This story is structured like the game, “Guess Who?” I have to admit, it completely confused me the first time I read it, when I thought the visuals were part of an ad and ignored them (doh!). Such an inventive way to tell the story, how the character sketches of the “people it isn’t” really add depth to the story of “who it is”. That revelation feels so truthful about how we bond with and drift away from friends, the toll of trauma and grief.
the claw machine (Nadia Born | New Flash Fiction Review)
Why I like it: When I first saw this while reading submissions for Issue 40 of NFFR, I exclaimed out loud after reading the first two sentences: the claw machine now offers babies for prizes. limited-edition grow-in-water-ones that you can take home. Just so brilliant. Born uses something commonplace (the claw machine – which Toy Story also uses to great effect) to approach themes of fertility and motherhood. The story was published by NFFR and shortlisted for the SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest shortlist in December 2025, right before I started my fellowship with SmokeLong. That felt auspicious, uniting as it did both my worlds.
PROMPT: List three things you want to write about but don’t know how. Take a game you’ve played or seen a lot, and reinvent its purpose to tell one of those stories slant.
Jesus scratch off (Rachel Hollis | Midway Journal)
Why I like it: We start with a woman buying scratch cards from a clerk who may be called Hank: He points to JESUS TAKE THE WHEEL! All glitter and guilt behind the glass. I haven’t seen the inside of a church since my mom disappeared. Surprising messages appear on the scratch cards that lead the woman in surprising directions. The way Hollis creates the white space in this, and the ending - damn!
A Door is a Secret, Revealed (Kathryn Kulpa | Fictive Dream)
Why I like it: You always know you’re in good hands with Kathryn Kulpa. She structures this one like a game of “What’s behind door number 1?”, and it’s inspired by a painting of four doors, Untitled (Four Doors) by Gertrude Abercrombie. We start with a girl playing hooky, then meet her uncle who feels more like a brother. They pass time together playing Scrabble and drums and Texas Hold ‘Em. Kulpa explores themes of loneliness, rebellion, PTSD and more with such a light touch. There’s then a gut punch of an ending that I won’t spoil.
PROMPT: Use the painting by Abercrombie to create a scenario where your character faces four choices, or have one decision lead to the next like in Kulpa’s piece. Bonus points if you can weave in mention of a game.
A Map of Woebegone Places (Elaine Chiew | SmokeLong Quarterly)
Why I like it: In this story, the artist paints imagined topographies and titles them with names like “Lonesome Hill” and “Heart’s Desire and Broken Hearts Lane.” Naming is his way of coping, of overcoming his past (“Valley of Punitive Gloominess”). I love the humour and pathos Chiew imparts in this story, which made me reflect on how the act of naming often provides an element of control.
Oranges (Jules Chung | Jellyfish Review)
Why I like it: Chung starts this off with a kicker – a girl with no belly button enjoying the screams this provokes from her classmates, and winning a playground game called “Squeeze the lemon.” This story took off for me when the narrator goes home to care for her ill mother, who does that disappointed mother thing so well: We thought you would be the first Korean swimmer in the Olympics. How their relationship progresses and that killer quote from Dierdre is so well done.
PROMPT: Choose a family relationship fraught with complications, expressed through game playing or competitive sports. Let one party whinge about the other and express disappointment. Reveal what’s really behind the contested event or characteristic.
Five different realities to explore and one to avoid (Bree Wernicke | Orion’s Belt)
Why I like it: I’m a sucker for parallel universes and speculative fiction. In this one, Wernicke’s structure is the game. The story that unfolds through these alternative realities just grows and grows – what if they’d spoken up, intervened, confronted a difficult situation instead of leaving? This is so beautifully summed up in the line: Over an awkward lunch, you confess you miss me, and I confess the same, and then we both take huge gulps of wine and pretend we never said it. The love story underneath the story is all the more devastating for being revealed in fragments.
Pigeon-toed (Claire Guo | SmokeLong Quarterly)
Why I like it: This first sentence sets up the story so well: Ma says girls should stand pigeon-toed so their bones learn how to stack themselves in triangles, the strongest shape. Guo is one of those writers whose imagery is just so fresh: Ma is thin like tissue paper, punched through by sunlight. She uses shapes to such great effect, with triangular vowels, intersecting ankles, even naming English as triangular. It’s a story of searching, identity, agency and, ultimately, how this mother and daughter support each other.
Hide-and-Seek (Nathaniel Lachenmeyer | X-R-A-Y)
Why I like it: This one starts with a traditional hide-and-seek game, told in a breathless paragraph, then jumps into the surreal with this lonely narrator waiting for years: I haven’t had any family for a long time now and all of us on the block we have all grown up and I think most of you have moved away too. I like those kind of risk-taking leaps, and Lachenmeyer’s repeat of the longed-for moment of shouting and laughing together is so poignant.
My Phone is the Supermoon (Nathan Alling Long | Electric Literature)
Why I like it: I love how Long loops around the topic of the moon, creating an orbit where he returns and returns to it. I like the observations of our mobile use, e.g. talking about the supermoon to friends - and by talk I mean text on my hand computer I only occasionally use as a phone – and sending supermoon pics – as if to say, “Look what I didn’t forget, look how connected to nature I am”. But really, the photo is only proof that I was staring at my phone instead of staring at the moon. And there’s a funny interlude about Wordle being gay – every day the app asks you, “What would you like to do?” It wants to please you. It’s definitely a bottom.
What did you think of these choices? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments - have you found a new favourite piece? Did you try out one of the prompts?
Next month’s selection will be chosen by Laura Black and it’s going to be a special edition celebrating ten years of Fictive Dream.
The Yorkshire Writing Retreat: with Matt Kendrick and Ruth Brandt
Monday 14th - Sunday 20th September 2026 in Thurlstone (Holme Valley)
***JUST TWO PLACES LEFT**
Join us in the idyllic landscape of the Holme Valley for a six-night writing retreat where you’ll learn from two widely experienced creative writing teachers through a series of workshops, feedback sessions and one-to-one chats. You’ll also have plenty of unstructured time dedicated to putting new words on the page.
Summer Workshop Series
A Snow Globe on an Iceberg: World-building in short fiction
With so little space to play with, how do we effectively bring a story’s world to life? How do we best evoke place, time, and wider context without it overwhelming the story?
Tuesday 7th July 2026 (19:00-20:30 BST) OR Saturday 11th July 2026 (09:00-10:30 BST)
What is Learnt in the Cradle: How our childhoods affect our adult selves
How do a character’s early influences affect who they become in later life? What do they inherit? What do they learn? And how do we use all of this within our writing to create character depth?
Tuesday 4th August 2026 (19:00-20:30 BST) OR Saturday 8th August 2026 (09:00-10:30 BST)
Write Beyond The Lightbulb
Glorious Words
How do we choose the right words to sharpen up our prose? How do we make our writing unique without it becoming obscure? Is the road to hell really paved with adverbs? This flash fiction course explores language in all its guts and glory, focussing on unique images, concision versus specificity and how to create original tone.
3rd - 16th August
I love the game theory—er, theme—and, after being blown away by the first story, am looking forward to reading them all! Thank you to Cole for selecting my story and Matt for this series. 🔥🔥🔥