There was that ball of dark wolf fur we played with, waiting for our mother to come home from work. In this new country she wanted us to live happily, in rooms which smelt of cinnamon tea and buttered toast. Time passed. Did you hear it huff and puff? A brick smashed our front window. Pigs, go home! More time. In the end, we agreed our house was just a story and there was no carpet, just wolf fluff, there was no furniture, just tatty curtains, there was not even a wolf, just the sound of walls breathing.

Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from Cyprus. Her work was included in Europa 28 (Comma Press, 2020) and National Flash Fiction Day anthologies (2020 and 2023). Her short fiction has also appeared, among others, in Sand Journal, FRiGG, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Fractured Lit and chosen for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2022 (selected by Kathy Fish). In recent years she has run successful workshops for the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol, UK.

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Judge's comment:

This was a story that kept gnawing away at me. Each time I read it, I noticed something new – how the title has multiple interpretations, how the story exists on different planes (fairy tale, specific family, universal commentary), the rhythmical mirror created by the sentence lengths (long sentences on the outside, short sentences in the middle) – there is so much skill and nuance here.