Diana Brown Wins “Underground” Flash Fiction Competition

We are delighted to announce the winner of our flash fiction competition with ArtBelow. The theme is “experiences on the Underground or Metro”, and we received many excellent entries.

However, there can be only one winner, so we would like to congratulate Diana Brown, who won with her amusing, sly piece, “This is My Chosen Story”. Congratulations are also due to our runners-up: Hazel Compton, Sarah Dobbs, Vanessa Woolf, and Samuel Draper—you can read their entries here.

We would like to thank ArtBelow for making this competition possible and for providing a great prize for the winning entry.

Here’s Diana Brown’s story—look out for it soon on a poster at a London Tube station near you!


This is My Chosen Story

By Diana Brown

John James had been in love most of his life. With people he had never met. An expert on the human condition, he felt that there was one woman, an actress, he would literally die for. Rose Harbison.

It was astonishing, therefore, when one morning in late spring he found himself on a tube opposite her. Gazing at her for a long time, he was knocked out by her beauty. It was extraordinary that someone like her would ever choose to travel by tube. She looked at him and smiled straight at him. John James blushed to the very core of his roots and nearly died on the spot. It was her! From then on he played a game and decided to stare at her for as long as possible until she did it again. After she had vanished back into the crowds he vowed to himself he would look after Rose. He would be her protector. They had a link.

John James remained a devoted lifetime supporter of Rose Harbison until the year 2011 when she produced her first autobiography. He read with rapture the first 81 pages when he came across a small paragraph:

“My boyfriend paid me a lot of money to travel five stops on a tube once, because he knew I had a fear of such things. I was enjoying it until some annoying geek caught my eye and insisted on staring at me in a rather disturbing way. Needless to say I have never travelled on public transport again.”

Needless to say, John James never went to see a Rose Harbison film again.

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