The Pride Roars
Flash Competition 2026
Highly Commended
The Glass Between Us
by Jenny Kingsley Emem
My mother used to say that God hides his most important lessons inside the people we almost didn’t notice. She said this the way she said everything, quietly, between tasks, as if the words were not meant to be remembered but somehow always were.
I remember her saying it the morning after I told her about the boy.
The conference room in Geneva is very cold. They keep it this way deliberately, I think, so that the body stays alert while the mind does the exhausting work of pretending that language about suffering is not, itself, a kind of suffering. I am presenting findings on gender-based violence frameworks in conflict-affected states. There are fifteen people around this table. They are all wearing lanyards. The projector hums.
I click to my first slide and for one disorienting second, I am not in Geneva.
I am ten years old and I am inside my father’s car and the leather seat is sticking to the backs of my thighs.
The traffic at Eket junction moved in the particular way of Nigerian traffic, not smoothly, not in a pattern, but in sudden lurches separated by long silences, like a conversation between people who are not sure they like each other. Papa was listening to the radio. I had my textbooks. The air conditioning made a sound like something trying and failing.
That was when I saw him.
He was maybe ten, my age, but he held himself differently than I held myself, with a straightness that was not confidence but calculation, the kind of posture that comes from balancing something precious and not being able to afford to drop it. The sachet water bags on his head caught the sun the way stained glass does, fracturing it into something almost holy.
He moved between the cars without hesitation. This was the thing I could not stop looking at, the no-hesitation of him. He had mapped every bumper, every exhaust pipe, every shifting wheel. His body knew things about that road that I would never know about any road.
Our eyes met for three seconds. He did not look away first. I did.
Mama asked me that evening what I was thinking about. We were eating, jollof rice, the good kind she made on Fridays when Papa came home early. I told her about the boy. I described his water bags, the way the sun went through them. I did not describe the three seconds because I did not yet have the language for what the three seconds had done to me.
She put her spoon down. She looked at me the way she sometimes looked at me, like I was a book she was not sure she had finished reading.
She said, the world has a structure, nne. Most people never see the structure. They only see the surface. She picked her spoon back up. She said, now that you have seen it, that is yours to carry.
I was ten. I did not understand that she was not giving me a comfort. She was giving me a commission.
Twenty years. Campaigns. Signatures. Policy briefs. Articles published in journals that matter to people who matter to other people. A fellowship. A degree delayed by one year because money ran out, I took three jobs and learned things about resource allocation that no textbook has yet accurately described. Then another degree. Then this conference room in Geneva, this cold room, this projector, these fifteen lanyards.
The presentation ends. There is applause, the restrained, professional kind, the kind that means adequate. A woman from the Netherlands asks a sharp question about enforcement mechanisms in low-state-capacity contexts. It is exactly the right question. I answer it carefully, but what I am thinking is: yes. That. That is the whole problem stated in seventeen words.
Afterward, a young man, intern, maybe, or junior researcher, stops me near the water station. He is Nigerian. I can hear it before he says it. He says he is from Akwa Ibom. He says my presentation mattered to him.
I look at him. He is maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. He is wearing a lanyard that means he is just beginning.
I think of the boy at the junction. I do not know what became of him. I have thought about this more times than I can count, have run the statistics in my head like a wound I keep pressing, knowing it will hurt, pressing anyway. The numbers are not kind.
But this young man is here. In this cold room. With his lanyard and his twenty-two years and his whole architecture still under construction.
I tell him: the question you are already asking, the “so what” question, do not stop asking it. Even when it is uncomfortable. Especially when it is uncomfortable. That question is the whole job.
He nods. He writes something down.
The conference ends. I take a taxi to the airport in the particular silence of someone who has said everything they prepared to say and is now alone with everything they didn’t.
Outside the window: Geneva. Clean, ordered, functioning. A city where infrastructure is so reliable it disappears. Where you can access almost any right because the architecture for accessing it was built carefully, maintained consistently, by people who understood that good systems are the ones nobody has to think about. I press my forehead lightly against the cold glass. I think of Mama. Now that you have seen it, that is yours to carry. I think of the boy. Twenty-nine now. Somewhere in the probability of Nigeria.I hope that something somewhere rearranged in the architecture of the world around him. I hope some law learned how to breathe. I hope some institution held. I am going back with a blueprint. The glass of the taxi window is cold against my skin.
This time, I do not look away.
Jenny Kingsley Emem is a development communications strategist, writer, and editor based in Abuja, Nigeria, whose work sits at the place where language becomes leverage. With over four years of experience working alongside NGOs, international organizations, and cross-border teams, she translates what is complex — programmatic data, policy arguments, impact evidence — into what moves people: donor-ready reports, concept notes, advocacy writing, and stakeholder communications that don’t just inform but persuade. She is the kind of editor who understands that consistency of voice is not a stylistic preference but an organizational asset. The kind of writer who knows that a well-structured sentence in a funding proposal can be the difference between a programme that exists and one that doesn’t. The kind of researcher who believes rigour and clarity are not opposites — that the most precise thinking, communicated well, is the most powerful thinking. Formally trained in TEFL and seasoned in remote, international collaboration across time zones and cultures, Jenny brings both the intelligence to understand complex work and the craft to make others understand it too. She does not just tell stories. She builds the communication architecture that makes organizations legible to the world.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-jenny-kingsley
Gutted
by JP Relph
What if you don’t leave. What if you shrug off your coat and your mood, come back to the kitchen where I’m hacking at tomatoes with a too-big knife, my teeth grinding unspoken words into seasoning. What if you put your arms around my waist like that winter morning when we first saw the kitchen, flushed and husky with the recklessness of buying a house like grownups - and while the realtor waited outside, you pressed me over the granite island and screwed me so hard I had a bruise like a gynae scar for days.
What if we don’t fight. What if you run your hands over my stomach, down, down where the flesh is puckered. What if you don’t flinch. What if you don’t mention the dust-quiet room painted perfect egg-yellow, nothing but a mobile of flying storks I found in a thrift store, turning round and round and round. What if you don’t question why I cut the bundles from their beaks. What if I let you pull me from the pulped tomatoes that are now only for sauce, right now, this moment, because we’re not tied to a calendar anymore.
What if after making up, we fix sandwiches with whatever’s left in the fridge and we smear them with dark mustard that makes our tongues burn. What if we kiss like strangers in a bar. What if you don’t mention your brother and how happy he is, how complete he is, now he has his boy. What if you say that I’m enough, me with my dust-quiet room, a tomato with the guts ripped out. What if you say you can love me, anyway. What if you shrug off your coat and your mood, and stay.
If you leave me, what if?
What if I free the seeds from the tomato gunk and plant them in pretty ceramic pots on the windowsill in the egg-yellow room, nurture them until they’re sprouts then shoots then tiny hairy leaves and the smell is raw and vivid green and in the early summer breeze, the weightless storks fly round and round and round, giddy with the promise of fruit.
https://therelphian1.wordpress.com/
Social links at: https://linktr.ee/JPRelph
Was and Wasn’t
She stood in front of the blackboard, looked at us as if we were there but not there, as if something was wrong with the world and she said ‘There’s a crow outside the window’, in a voice that was there and wasn’t, and it was hoarse as if she’d been crying, and flat and toneless, as if she’d given up on herself, and how were we to know what she meant when she repeated ‘There’s a crow, look!’ and then Ted let out a wolf whistle, the class cracked up and a few of us banged on our desks, Dana started singing crow oh, hey oh, and tears rolled down our cheeks, it was the most hilarious thing since my attempt to recite to be or not to be.
She stared at us and not us, she was there and not ‘all there’ Amy said, tapping her index finger on her right temple, but how were we to know that she had a life in the world outside the classroom, that she’d had a life before the hit-and-run two summers before, that she’d had a daughter who now wasn’t, that a beak constantly pecked at the soft skin on her head and the whole black sky was thick with plucked feather clouds.
Mrs Crow, sometimes remembered in awkward silence at reunions – how she opened the door and simply walked out, cawing, her throat dry as chalk when she said, ‘I know who I am and one day you will, too.’
Nora Nadjarian is an author from Cyprus. Her short fiction has been published in various journals including Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit, CRAFT, matchbook, Centaur, Pithead Chapel and was chosen for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2022 (selected by Kathy Fish). She placed third in the Welkin Writing Prize in 2025. She is also a widely published poet and her latest poetry collection 'Iktsuarpok' is available from Broken Sleep Books.
Bluesky: @noranadj.bsky.social
Was and Wasn’t
by Nora Nadjarian
She stood in front of the blackboard, looked at us as if we were there but not there, as if something was wrong with the world and she said ‘There’s a crow outside the window’, in a voice that was there and wasn’t, and it was hoarse as if she’d been crying, and flat and toneless, as if she’d given up on herself, and how were we to know what she meant when she repeated ‘There’s a crow, look!’ and then Ted let out a wolf whistle, the class cracked up and a few of us banged on our desks, Dana started singing crow oh, hey oh, and tears rolled down our cheeks, it was the most hilarious thing since my attempt to recite to be or not to be.
She stared at us and not us, she was there and not ‘all there’ Amy said, tapping her index finger on her right temple, but how were we to know that she had a life in the world outside the classroom, that she’d had a life before the hit-and-run two summers before, that she’d had a daughter who now wasn’t, that a beak constantly pecked at the soft skin on her head and the whole black sky was thick with plucked feather clouds.
Mrs Crow, sometimes remembered in awkward silence at reunions – how she opened the door and simply walked out, cawing, her throat dry as chalk when she said, ‘I know who I am and one day you will, too.’
Nora Nadjarian is an author from Cyprus. Her short fiction has been published in various journals including Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit, CRAFT, matchbook, Centaur, Pithead Chapel and was chosen for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2022 (selected by Kathy Fish). She placed third in the Welkin Writing Prize in 2025. She is also a widely published poet and her latest poetry collection 'Iktsuarpok' is available from Broken Sleep Books.
Bluesky: @noranadj.bsky.social
X : @NoraNadj
Instagram: @noranadj
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