Welcome, welcome, welcome
to the
2026 Flash Suite Contest
posting daily on
Defenestrationism.net
until January 19th
Pull your chair in closer to the fire, we have stories to tell.
What makes community? It is the theme of this winter’s contest, after all.
These suites from around the world demonstrate mutual understandings of what brings us together in sibling-hood. They share motifs, overlap their thematic arcs, ask many the same questions– even beyond the selected finalists, the submissions we did not have space to include do much the same. Only in fiction could so many different communities coalesce quite so synonymously.
There’s something about the wind that will build community in more than half of these finalizing works. There will be lots of places to sit, too– animal, vegetable, mineral and emotional places to sit.
Music will become a prominent element, appearing and reappearing. Silence will be no barrier, however, nor forgetting, as language and letters and our organic flesh remind us to reach for human, or human-like, connections.
In marketplaces, town squares, waiting in coffee-shops, in the 80 percent resonance that folds our impressions into one shell– in the places where we gather, whether two or 10,000– we will find our community. By matchmaking and naming one another, we might find it faster, or at least in a way worth waiting for. And with shared morality: morality among mortals and between machines, even objects seem to have a moral code inside of them, in this winter’s contest on Defenestrationism.net
When flesh gains meaning, when what’s between us connects– it’s what we learn shivering in the dark– when them becomes us, that is community on Defenestrationism.net
But why this year, of all disastrous years, is community our theme?
In August of 2025, as ICE and Authoritarianism seemed omnipresent in all our individual lives, I was invited backstage after a concert for an album release party. It was Cumbia music, a Latin American music. My Spanish is not so limited that I could not recognize the word comunidad mentioned by every person toasting to the band’s achievement. In this immigrant-centered, deeply threatened, victory of music and dance in public places, it was their communities that stayed in every person’s mind, on their lips and fingertips, in their sweat, reverberating through their flesh.
— Paul-Newell Reaves,
owner, co-editor, Defenestrationism.net
So keep surfing through, Lovers of Literature, for
30 days of daily posting.
And remember us next time–
we do this contest thing three times a year.
Guidelines/ What is a Flash Suite, you may ask?
Meet the Finalists (Coming Soon)
How we Judge
Announcing Our Finalists:
Systems of Us
by Diana Parrilla
posting December 20th-22nd:
The Last Murder
Half of Us
The Schism Wars
Razz
by Eleanor Cullen
posting December 23rd-25th:
Her
Me
Them
The Town that Forgot Its Name
by Irene W Collins
posting December 26th-29th:
The Mayor’s Silence
The Butcher’s Boy
The Bell Tower
The Woman Who Named the Wind
We Build the Sunlight
by Ibrahim Abdulhakeem
posting December 30th-January 2nd:
I. The Fence Builders
II. The Market Choir
III. The Night School
IV. When We Danced the Street Awake
The Sky Between Us
by Arif Rehman Khan
posting January 3rd-January 5th:
1. The Chair in the Square
2. When We Spun Together
3. The Sky Between Us
Fan Voting:
January 6th-18th
Winners Announced:
Martin Luther King, jr. Day (US)
January 19th
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