New Writers Flash Fiction Competition 2025 – Winner
First Kiss
by Garglestone
And on the way home this spin-the-bottle variant began down the back of the bus, in which the kissee was blindfolded and invited to guess the identity of the kisser
(an inert bit of gamification, since guessing rightly or wrongly entailed no consequence)
and Tom and I weren’t playing because we both had girlfriends in another school
so we sat together at the front of the bus, reading
Edgar Allan Poe
and
FourFourTwo
respectively
and the turn came of Hannah Flynn to be kissed, a person describable in the cruel hierarchical terminology of the schoolyard as
a nerd
and the bottle elected pig-ignorant Barry McNock
a jock
to be her kisser—
and a commotion began
—a complex dumb-show in which McNock mimed retching, and waved his hand dismissively, to signal his
unwillingness
to kiss
while Hannah’s friends made frantic, threatening gestures
and poor Hannah sat there blindfolded, as the silence accumulated significance, surely guessing what was happening, surely feeling sick to her stomach
and the sudden intensification of the atmosphere drew the attention of the rest of the bus
so that we all looked on in horror
as though paralysed
until Tom handed me his book and walked silently down the aisle, and knelt by Hannah’s seat,
and kissed her, and then marched back up the aisle and resumed his seat, transformed,
while Hannah laughed
in triumph or despair
and broke the rules
by guessing
Edgar
Allan
Poe
—for there was no one in our class who bore that name.
Author bio: Garglestone is a tall glass of water. He lives in Greece with his wife and daughter. His recent fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine and Northern Gravy.