Matt Kendrick
Writer | Editor | Teacher
WELKIN MINI 2025 - FIRST PLACE
Nine One One
by Sarah Freligh
The birds in my head are yakking again so I ask the orderly to give me something please that will shut them up please but he says honey you know I can’t so the birds go on flapping like they do when something terrible is about to happen only there’s no window to slip out of like the man did the woman did they held hands they did I saw them step into thin air and fly like birds from a fire a big squawk of them lifting off and flapping their useless wings all those people trying to fly.
Sarah Freligh is the author of seven books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash contest and Other Emergencies, forthcoming from Moon City Press in 2025. Her work has appeared many literary journals and anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation​
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Judge's comment:
I must have read my top twenty stories about a dozen times in order to decide my winners, and each time I came to this micro, I was immediately reeled in by that opening image – those birds yakking away. That description spoke to me on a personal level. I know those birds, I know the emotions which they conjure up. This piece was one of many sent into the competition that was written in a single “breathless” sentence, but this, for me, was the one that showed what a one-sentence piece can really do. I love the way it builds. I love the way it folds in different textures and tones. I love how it exists on the periphery between the real and the dreamlike. And I love how it gives a reader just enough that everything is clear, but still leaves them with so many things they are asked to work out for themselves.