When award winning novelist Tannis Laidlaw read about a new weekly flash fiction contest using four 'elements' that had to be incorporated in a 500 word story, she thought the idea amusing at first, but ultimately thought-provoking and challenging even though she was primarily a novelist and a scientific research writer.

Nevertheless, she put her hat in the Iron Writer ring, setting herself another task: she wouldn't allow herself to make use of supernatural beings, fantasy, or magical realism when trying to incorporate the elements in any of the stories. No vampires, no made-up worlds and no secret powers. There's plenty of magic in her stories: the magic of location (a hermit in the wilds of the Canadian bush in A Clean and Tidy Life, or in deepest 19th century Africa in An African Safari); the magic of psychology (The Mayan Legend and Seventy in particular but psychology is in almost all her stories – she is a psychologist, after all) and the magic of stories for adults who used to be children (see Christmas Bedtime Story and The Nursery Rhyme). Sometimes not using fantasy is difficult given a few of the elements that had to be included, for instance, 'a talking tree' in the last item in the book. She solved that problem by having a talking tree in the imagination of a frightened little boy. She also tells the reader how any particular story came to be written - maybe a news item, overhearing a comment, or remembering that old boyfriend...

If you like 'flash fiction', or 'short shorts' or whatever you call one-page stories, read on. Here are twenty-six stories, twenty-six locations and many more than twenty-six unique characters.