SPECIAL CALL -- "Aftermath"

FFO Special Call: "Aftermath"

Flash Fiction Online is seeking submissions for an issue exploring the theme of Aftermath, scheduled for January 2027. The guest editor for this issue is Lark Morgan Lu. 

“But as she and Rin had both discovered, the battles were easy. Destroying was easy. The hard part was the aftermath.” - R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

What We're Looking For:

Oftentimes, stories are declared completed upon the resolution of their largest event. The dragon has been slain. The murderer has been brought to justice. A peace agreement has ended the war. A domestic violence survivor successfully and permanently escapes. This call is intended to ask: what happens after that? How do you rebuild– what does rebuilding even look like?

The average natural disaster is perhaps worth a few weeks of media coverage and yet it takes years, sometimes over a decade, for a community to recover. The journey to heal the invisible scars of great loss and harm can span generations. In cases of war there may never be something that could be described as a recovery. This issue will explore narratives where sustained survival and eventual thriving is a brave and subversive act. Stories where the big “thing”, whatever it may be, has already happened. Perhaps it happened last week. Maybe it happened years ago. And sometimes, the thing can happen so long ago that no one alive knows what it precisely was.

This issue is also especially interested in submissions from authors who have been affected (interpreted broadly) by forced migration due to natural disaster, climate change, colonialism, and genocide. Their submissions are not expected to cover the specific event(s) that impacted them.

Some media related to the concept of aftermath:

• We Are the Mountain: A Look at the Inactive Protagonist by Vida Cruz
• STET by Sarah Gailey
• A Recipe for the Day Alban Kills the King by M.R. Robinson
• Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones by Torrey Peters
• Das Brot by Wolfgang Borchert and other trümmerliteratur (“rubble literature”) from post WWII Germany
• Lily, the Immortal by Kylie Lee Baker
• 1000xRESIST
• Disco Elysium

We would consider the following a hard sell:

• Post-hoc justifications of real world conflict
• Narratives leading up to or ending on another revolution or big event
• Vignettes (inactive protagonists are not necessarily vignette pieces)
• Callous "-cides"
• Narratives centered exclusively on traumatic events

All stories submitted through this page must fit the theme! If you have a story that doesn’t fit this theme, please submit during one of our regular submission calls.

WORD COUNT: 500-1,000 words. Because we are focused on flash fiction, this word count is firm.

SCHEDULE: 

• This call will be open from July 1-31, 2026.
• FFO reviews stories in two stages – a slush stage and a winnowing stage. In the slush round, first readers vote on stories to be passed forward. These top-tier stories are reviewed once a month in our Winnowing round. Final decisions on these second-round stories are generally made within 12 weeks from the date of submission.
• Ebook release date: January 1, 2027
• Each story then has its own release day on our website within the month of January.

ANONYMOUS SUBMISSIONS: YES. Do not include your name, address, email, or other identifying information on your manuscript (header, byline, file name, etc). This allows our First Readers to evaluate your story based on the work alone.

SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS – YES

MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS – NO, one story per author for this call

REPRINTS – NO, we have a separate call for that

FFO's AI POLICY: NO. We are committed to publishing stories written and edited by humans. We reserve the right to reject any submission that we suspect to be primarily generated or created by language modeling software, Chat GPT, chat bots, or any other AI apps, bots, or software. We reserve the right to ban submissions from accounts, emails, or users who we believe or suspect have submitted AI-generated content.

PAYMENT & RIGHTS FOR ORIGINAL FICTION: For original (previously unpublished) fiction, Flash Fiction Online pays $100 per story for first electronic rights, with six months exclusivity, as well as a non-exclusive one-time right to publish the stories in an anthology. The author retains all other rights. Original stories must not have been previously published anywhere, including a blog or on Patreon. Payment is made via PayPal (preferred) or mailed as a check.