“Before the film begins, I want to tell you a story,” I’d say, standing at the library podium, the lights dimmed, the audience hushed. The screen behind me glowed with the still image of a young James Dean, half in shadow. I always spoke before the opening credits rolled—five, maybe ten minutes—just long enough to introduce the actor, to share something they’d never forget. Something that would cling to them long after the final scene. “When James Dean was nine, his mother died of cancer. Her body...

The sixteen best stories from the 2026 running of The Saturday Evening Post's annual short fiction contest. Featuring my winning story, "No Swimming at Monson's."

I come from a long line of women who held their pain quietly, who carried too much and asked for too little. Irish women. Women with too many kids, too little money, too much grief. Women who smoked through the storm, who buried sorrow beneath casseroles and silence. Women who waited for bad news in kitchens filled with cigarette smoke and folded it into their days like laundry. Women who clenched their jaws and passed down trauma like heirlooms. I was raised by one of them. My mother never dran...

All Ruth saw was more attention. And when the wrong kind of attention showed up, people like her paid for it. The June heat shimmered off the sidewalks, rising in waves that blurred the edges of palm trunks and lampposts. Humidity pressed against Ruth’s skin as she stepped out of the motel’s back corridor, the scent of salt from Matanzas Bay mingling with the sweetness of blooming jasmine. Her uniform clung to her back, damp before she’d even begun her rounds.

My daughter Frankie doesn’t say my name. She knows it. I’ve heard her whisper it at night, curled up in her toddler bed, when the house is quiet and the shadows stretch across the floor. “Mommy,” she breathes, and for a second I believe I’ve dreamed it. At night, behind her door, she practices. Soft words slip out like secrets, as if she’s testing them before anyone can hear. Pressure shuts her down. But in the dark, when no one is watching, her voice feels safe. In the daylight, I try. I kneel. I call to her. She turns to me, eyes bright, smile full, but I can tell she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. She opens her mouth like she’s going to answer, but instead I hear bits of “Old McDonald” or sounds that don’t quite form words.

It started with a palm frond. One of those thick, green giants that fan out over Florida yards like they own the place. My Uncle Bob ripped one clean off the tree, held it high over his head, and marched barefoot around the pool. Jimmy Buffett’s “Volcano” blared from the lanai speakers, steel drums skipping over sun-soaked chaos. Kids doing cannonballs, adults sloshing bourbon in plastic cups, and bathing suits doubling as dinner clothes. He said nothing. Just grinned and kept moving. We followed. Every one of us. Cousins dripping pool water, aunts in cover-ups, and the dogs trotting at our heels, nails clicking on the pavement as if they were tap dancing. The conga line snaked through the screen door, into the kitchen, and around the card table stacked with paper plates and Publix potato salad. No one asked why.

It’s 1:17 a.m., and I’m sitting on the floor of my kitchen drinking Dr Pepper Blackberry out of the can like it’s medicine for a heartbreak I haven’t earned yet. I haven’t cried today, but I can feel it coming, crouched behind my molars. This beverage might be the gateway. The label promises “Delightfully Dark. Subtly Sweet,” which, coincidentally, is also how I described myself during a short-lived phase in college when I tried to brand myself as “the mysterious girl who reads Bukowski and wear...

WHEN I WAS five years old, my elementary school held an assembly that included a special visitor, Harry the Habit Kicker. (Harry was actually our school resource officer in a giant bear costume.) He wore a shirt that read SAY NO TO DRUGS, and he carried a white bag with BAD STUFF scrawled across it. Harry demonstrated the consequences of drugs by placing the bag into his mouth. We all watched in horror as he jumped around, waving his fuzzy arms frantically, then fell to the floor, dead.

The aquarium sat by the register, a glass cube gone cloudy with years of grease and cigarette smoke. Algae filmed the corners, and the filter rattled like it might give out at any second. I always chose the booth across from it, the one with vinyl patched in duct tape, so I could watch the fish drift in slow, half-hearted circles.

The headline says my father baptized an alligator in the fountain outside Publix. FLORIDA MAN SAVES GATOR’S SOUL, STORE SECURITY NOT IMPRESSED.Someone cropped his face and added a halo. Someone else turned him into a Saint candle. A TikTok kid looped his prayer over a trap beat. The clip shows Dad in his church suit, cuffs rolled, shoes off, water rising around his shins. One hand on the gator’s back, the other raised to heaven. The gator looks half asleep. The crowd cheers. A manager waves a mop...

My father drank black Maxwell House from a repurposed Big Gulp cup, the kind with a faded NASCAR logo and a plastic straw he never used. Every morning, long before the world stirred, he filled it to the brim and cradled it between his knees as he drove to work. No cream. No sugar. Just heat, grit, and something close to devotion.

The road runs straight as a taut string. On both sides, fields make a green and white quilt. Cotton blooms into fists. Corn lifts thin flags that clatter in the wind. Summer heat shakes the edges of the asphalt. Vultures wheel overhead and settle on fence posts like sentries who do not blink. I drive this road often. Groceries. Daycare pickup. Library returns. A loop of errands that feels safe until it does not. The first time I noticed the bodies, I was late for work. A raccoon lay with its paws...

The one-hour photo smelled of vinegar and metal, the scent clinging to the back of my throat like it might stay there forever. My hands sweated inside the sleeves of my windbreaker as I slid the yellow Kodak envelope across the counter. The clerk, a man with nicotine-stained fingers, tore the seal with his teeth, holding the flap open like it was a wound. He flipped through the stack without looking at me, his mouth tight. “Most of these didn’t turn out,” he said. His voice was flat but no...

Toilet Bowl Funeral The first time Goldie died, my father flushed him without ceremony. “Quick and painless,” he muttered. I leaned over the bowl, watching the orange body spiral down. My mother ruffled my hair and said, “That’s life,” before boiling spaghetti. But the next morning, Goldie was back. He filled the toilet tank, scales brushing porcelain, one cloudy eye staring at me as if we’d both made a mistake. My father cursed but could not bring himself to flush again. “He wants somethi...

Feeds: PO AD LIB. It appeared one morning in blue ink on her whiteboard, just below her weight and care times—another piece of coded hospital language I wasn’t meant to understand. Another mysterious acronym in a sea of them, bobbing somewhere between hope and heartbreak. I stared at those three words for a long time. After five weeks of bracing myself for bad news and interpreting every beep, chart, and monitor, here was a phrase so quiet I nearly missed it. In the NICU, everything meant something, and anything could mean everything. Where one small change could unravel everything or stitch something back together. No one warns you that birth can drop you into another world. Where day and night are meaningless and your child’s life depends on machines that sound like alarms in a spaceship.

Every Christmas, we dress a rented mannequin and call it Uncle Ray. It comes from a party store off the highway, boxed in cardboard soft with grease. The tag reads DISPLAY UNIT. HANDLE WITH CARE. The clerk knows us now. He slides the box across the counter without a word, as if silence is part of the rental. The first year, it was a joke. Dad said, "We need someone to carve the ham." Mom propped the blank white body at the head of the table and tucke...

Every December my family brings out the mannequin and dresses it in Uncle Ray’s flannel, boots, and watch, a winter ritual that began as a joke and softened into something we never named after he died. Tonight, the candles burn low on the dining table, their light thin as breath, and when everyone drifts to the living room, I stay behind in the hush, facing the figure we’ve filled with his things. The coat still carries a trace of cedar and cigarette smoke. The watch on its wrist ticks with a borrowed steadiness, the kind that makes you listen harder in the dark.

The first time I heard the story, I was eight. My uncle whispered it after supper while we swatted mosquitoes and picked fish bones clean. “The Skunk Ape lives where the swamp doesn’t end,” he said, pointing toward the cypress line where the sky thickened into night. “Smells like death. Walks like a man, only larger. Red eyes if you catch the light right.” I laughed the way children laugh at warnings, but I remembered how his finger trembled when he drew the cross...