The 704 Prize for Flash Fiction 2025
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September 9, 2025
West Trade Review is happy to announce the results of the first annual 704 Prize for Flash Fiction.
Congratulations to each writer!
GRAND PRIZE ($704 & publication in the spring 2026 print edition): "Monsoon Worms" by Ashni Math
"I couldn't stop reading this otherworldly story, trying to follow its clues and arrows. The mother, so faintly sketched, was deeply vivid to me against a wild, timeless, almost pre-industrial world. I felt for her as she performed her domestic duty in an oppressive atmosphere, where the march of time draws us into a place of fatal gloom and horror. A husband becoming a body, love becoming death. I very much enjoyed the absence of heroism in his maternal story, also the warmth and simplicity of its descriptions of survival, ‘sipping chai from a ceramic mug before the children wake’. Here is a mother exhausted by the demands of others and taking no prisoners: ‘Dahi khao. Eat your yogurt.’ ‘Chup karo. Shut up’. In this lonely crisis there is no evidence of the modern concept of ‘parenting’ at play, and we like the mother a lot for this.
It is astonishing to me that such upheaval can be related in a few spare paragraphs that barely fill a page in Word. I love the sense of renewal the rain brings even as it dredges up reminders of death. The eternal cycle is beautifully compressed in these few delicate words. This is a story about enduring the impossible, putting one foot in front of the next in the shadow of death, and with all that, even being able to take a moment out of your day to admire earthworms in the dirt.” --Maggie Armstrong, Contest Judge
Look for Angela's flash story in the Spring 2026 print edition of West Trade Review.
Ashni Math is a nonfiction writer, poet, and educator located in New York City. A second-year MFA candidate at Columbia University, she creates experimental, genre-fluid, and often bizarre works that ask and occasionally answer the absurd questions of the everyday.
Honorable Mention: "Shark Boy" by Dawn Miller
“'Shark Boy' is an affecting story, warm and loveable, and a feat of structure, precision, economy. I imagined a film adaptation by Noah Baumbach.” -Maggie Armstrong, Contest Judge
Look for Dawn's story in the Spring 2026 print edition of West Trade Review.
Dawn Miller ’s work appears in The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Pithead Chapel, Vestal Review, Toronto Star, Room Magazine, Bath Flash Fiction anthologies, Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025, and elsewhere. She is the proud recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant and lives in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect on IG @dawnmillerwriter and Bluesky @dawnwriter.bsky.social
Maggie Armstrong’s short fiction has been published in the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Banshee and elsewhere. Her story ‘Dinner and a Show’ was long-listed for an Irish Book Award. Her first book, Old Romantics, was published by Tramp Press in 2024. Her essay on watching movies at home after a family breakup is forthcoming in 2025 in the next collection from Paper Visual Arts. She lives in Dublin.
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Contest Judge: Maggie Armstrong
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