Why Do The Village Sunflowers Pray So Blindly To The Sun?

Longlisted (Top 10%): New Writers Flash Fiction Competition

When does passion turn to need, and where does it sit in a sleepy village draped in propriety? Why Do The Village Sunflowers Pray So Blindly To The Sun? is a flash fiction piece on sin, secrecy, shame, and social norms which plays with rhythm and meter in its form. It was one of two pieces longlisted (top 50 out of 600+) at the 2025 New Writers Flash Fiction Competition.

The sun is just a star that cannot twinkle; it can’t see you wish it would. If I were a speck on the eyelid of eternity, it would not even notice me, and I don’t know why he should.

The vicar draped the village in secrets, and my sweat-anointed brow dripped on his thirsty lips. The cloisters sang hosanna as I bent into Eucharist: inside its brittle pain I was mere congregant, in his possessing ownership.

Meanwhile, from the belfry, the mouse that lived next door witnessed our communion. Perhaps I glimpsed him by the cinders in his eye, but before I could be sure, he had skittered out of sight–homilies in his ears–to his little new-build mouse-hole clad in Barratt brick. With his coat back on its stand, he held his sleeping mouse-wife who drank in the bath and ignored the kids they hadn’t planned. Like people are meant to do.

When dawn cut through the gable, morning split us in release. I chastely kissed the vicar as he dressed my naked body, and left him to say matins he forgot to do on time. All week, afar, I watched him, a sunflower seeking sunbeams; and nightly, crucified him with my nails until I bled where I was pierced by the splinters of the wooden frame beneath.

I am not a person; I am just another lie, and a lie that looks just like you is a sin that cannot die, and a deathless thing is not a thing that fears an absent God, said to nestle in some Heaven held within a vacant sky that crowns some hidden Babel at the steeple of the church atop the hill beyond the thicket of suburbia that pretends that it hasn’t always known exactly what, and who, and why.