We asked you to get nefarious and you didn’t disappoint. We asked you to get creative with your crime-based flash fiction and you rose to the task. Once again, it was a joy (and a challenge) to judge so many remarkable entries. You brought our favorite brand of weirdness to one of the more structured genres out there, and the crime stories featured in Monday’s Flash Felon mega-issue will leave readers gobsmacked and breathless.

And while we’ll be celebrating these 10 sinister and offbeat crime-themed stories for the next few days, the focus will soon shift to the Shadow Award. Our first-ever poetry contest—primarily judged by our associate editor and kick-ass poet Mary Lenoir Bond—is in the home stretch with a May 31st soft deadline, so send over your dark and weird poetry for a chance at cash prizes and the honor of being among the very first poetry that The Molotov Cocktail has ever published.

Stay tuned in the near future for details on our next quarterly flash fiction contest, which will be branded #FlashIcon and will seek stories that involve an iconic person, place or thing. Completely open to all genres; it just has to revolve around an icon. Should be a fun one.

And now to the goods…

We had a slightly lower than average turnout this time around, but that didn’t translate into fewer quality entries. On the contrary, the deliberation process became painstaking as we got down to under 30 top entries. As a result, there’s plenty of non-cigars to hand out. Close-but-no-cigar mentions go to the following writers:

Seth Augenstein

Christina Dalcher

Calvin Demmer

Ryan Dempsey

GJ Hart

DI Hughes (2)

Shona McCombes

Charlotte Merckens

Christopher P. Mooney (2)

Jonathan Ochoco

Brad Rose

Aeryn Rudel

Lucas Snoey

Christopher Stanley

Derek Thompson

G.D. Watry

We are truly grateful to have the chance to read each and every entry that came in. Your hard work and creative minds are what make these contests a success.

The Top 10 that you’ll find below will be published in our forthcoming Flash Felon mega-issue, which will run on Monday, May 16th. They will also be included in this fall’s Prize Winners Anthology print issue, which will feature the Top 10 finishers from our other quarterly contests and the Shadow Award poetry contest. You can check out last year’s Prize Winners Anthology here.

That’s enough yammering from me.

10th Place – “Space Monkey Mafia” by Allison Spector

9th Place – “The Noose on the Roof” by Charles Scott

8th Place – “Libertas” by Warren Buchanan

7th Place – “Jokers to the Right” by Rich Larson

6th Place – “The Sitting Room” by Aeryn Rudel

5th Place – “Beyond the Briars” by Joshua Patterson

4th Place – “Everything Must Go” by Emily Livingstone

And now on to the three entries that really blew our minds:

3rd Place

“Blood Feather and Soft Feather”

by Melissa Monks

2nd Place

“Postmaster”

by Henry Whittier-Ferguson

1st Place

“The London Umbrella Company”

by Jan Kaneen

Congrats to the winners and a huge thanks to everyone who participated in the Flash Felon contest.We literally couldn’t do this without you. Check back Monday, May 16th for the Flash Felon mega-issue!