Announcing the Winner of the "Lessons" Flash Fiction Competition
Heba Hallak’s “Under Pressure” is a masterclass in compression, metaphor, and quiet emotional truth.
There are some stories that arrive gently and leave a bruise. Heba Hallak’s Under Pressure is one of them.
In just over 250 words, Hallak captures the internal life of a young woman caught between cultural expectations, emotional upheaval, and the unsettling tension of a kitchen she doesn’t belong in. The story’s brilliance lies not in grand narrative arcs, but in its restraint. This is flash fiction at its finest: compressed, precise, and utterly resonant.
“The pressure pan whistled sharply, cutting through the silence of Aunt Ayla’s kitchen.”
From the opening line, we are immersed in a charged domestic space. The metaphor of the pressure pan, introduced early, becomes the elegant centrepiece of the piece—quietly layered and full of thematic weight. The protagonist is “eyeing it like a fused bomb,” and by the story’s close, it’s clear this tension isn’t only culinary.
Hallak navigates the intersection of tradition and emotion with delicacy. The protagonist is not simply cooking; she is performing gendered expectations, bracing against an emotional fallout she can’t fully name. Her fiancé, Malik, has erupted the day before, grief-stricken and unreachable. She is told this kitchen lesson will help her when she marries. But what she learns has nothing to do with recipes.
“Now—pressure pans, they’re like people: force them to open up too soon, and they’ll explode.”
Aunt Ayla’s analogy hits like a balm and a warning. With that one line, Hallak stitches together the emotional and the practical, turning the kitchen into a theatre for personal insight. This moment feels earned, not forced. The wisdom is not only passed down through family, but through metaphor—and that’s what elevates this story.
Like the best flash fiction, Under Pressure feels much larger than its word count. It simmers with unspoken dynamics: between generations of women, between lovers navigating silence and grief, between a narrator’s desire to help and the lesson that listening sometimes means waiting, not fixing.
It’s deceptively simple writing—the hardest kind to do well.
We’re absolutely thrilled to name Heba Hallak the winner of our first Lemon Jelly Press flash fiction competition. We hope this story lingers with you, as it did with us. You can read it in full below.
Under Pressure
By Heba Hallak
The pressure pan whistled sharply, cutting through the silence of Aunt Ayla’s kitchen.
I took a step back, eyeing it like a fused bomb. I did not know what to do next. I still didn’t know why I’d agreed to this in the first place. Cooking wasn’t my specialty, nor did I wish it to be. But Ayla insisted it’d be a bonding experience, even when the glimmer in her eyes said otherwise—You’ll need it when you marry was written all over her face.
I paced by the pan rack. Malik’s outburst from yesterday replayed in my mind—a rare and uncharacteristic storm from the man I was soon marrying. I had only wanted to listen, to give him space for his grief, yet—
The pan screeched louder. My head snapped up, and I stepped forward, lifted the lid.
It exploded.
It leapt off the stove, sauce splattering across the counter, the floor. I pressed shaky hands to my face.
Ayla rushed in, her bathroom break cut short.
“Just what have you done?” she stood aghast, processing the mess.
We set to cleaning immediately.
“You know, when I was learning, like you, I used analogies all the time to memorize how everything in the kitchen worked,” she said, scrubbing at the sauce, “Now—pressure pans, they’re like people: force them to open up too soon, and they’ll explode.”
She winked. How she knew what troubled me was beyond me, but I left that day with valuable advice—for both cooking and love.
🟡
About the Author:
Heba Hallak is a Brazilian-Lebanese writer and editor. She has recently graduated with a degree in English Language and Literature, and her interests include Gothic, Victorian, and Contemporary literature. Though often experimenting with different genres, Heba mostly enjoys writing mystery and whodunit fiction.
To follow up on her writing, you may subscribe to her Substack publication, The Humanities Notebook, where she posts essays, reflections, and educational content on topics such as linguistics, literature, history, and religion, and where she hopes to publish some of her original short fiction.
You may also check out The Agora Magazine (@agorathemagazine on Instagram), a youth-led literary publication Heba actively edits and writes for.
To contact her, you may email her at heba.hallak288@gmail.com or send her a DM on Linkedin (Heba El Hallak) or Instagram (@heba.m.hallak).
Congrats! So, it's only one post ..I thought there would be more.