Walter Grady spends his mornings in the yard, pruning the bougainvillea, skimming the pool, and collecting the mangos that drop faster than he can keep up with them. The tree leans over the fence, thick with leaves and older than the house itself. Fruit hits the ground with soft, fleshy thuds. By noon the yard smells sweet and spoiled.

I didn’t worry at first. I was just tired, the kind of tired people warn you about when you’re pregnant. The kind that comes with knowing smiles, jokes about second trimesters, and the soft implication that your body has its own plans and you need to relax into them. But this was different. I slept seventeen, eighteen hours a day. I woke long enough to eat something bland, shower sitting down, and collapse back into bed.

The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2026 — The Long List

Longlist: Bethany Bruno, “Culls”

Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction Finalist: “She’s Always Dying”

By the time Sherry Velasco pinned on her Miss Hibiscus Queen sash behind the VFW hall in Panama City, sweat had soaked the back of her dress, two blisters had risen above the straps of her borrowed heels, and her mother had called from the bingo hall to say she’d sold the window unit for quick cash, which explained why Sherry’s curled hair had already gone soft and wild in the April damp.

Shortlist—"Silt"

Finalist in the Adroit Journal’s 2026 Djanikian & Veasna So Scholars for "Buried"

The tarp snapped over the roof’s wound. Blue plastic pulled tight against a sky that had already done enough. A strip of bright blue plastic, nailed over the back slope, lifted at the corner and slapped down again, flat and impatient, as if the roof had started talking back. Blue tarps still stitched the neighborhood after Frances and Jeanne, nailed down over roofs that hadn’t stopped leaking. Wind off the St. Lucie River tugged at it, testing each nail head, each torn grommet, each weak point.

Thank you to everyone who submitted for this contest and thought outside the box for this theme! As I mentioned when originally opening to subs for this contest, I wanted to help break the stigma around disability/mental health/chronic illnesses by trying to reframe and challenge writers to try to see how what they deal with isn’t a weakness but their strength. Oftentimes, mental health, disability, and chronic illnesses can have derogatory or negative connotations attached to these, and I wante...

The first thing you learn growing up near the glades is that stillness is a kind of power. Not quiet. Not hiding. Just the stillness of an alligator, belly pressed into the mud, eyes watching without ever blinking. They don’t have to flinch. They know they own the land.

Now, in my thirties, I hear her again, this time through the walls of my daughter’s room. “She’s fine,” my husband says, rocking her back to sleep. His voice lands easily; it does not have to travel far. But my mother’s words echo differently through memory. They bend. They return like tidewater over shells. I have lived most of my life inside half silence, a place both crowded and lonely. It teaches you to watch mouths, to read pauses, and to fill in missing notes. It also teaches patience. Silence has weight, like deep water; you learn to move through it slowly and to trust what you cannot see.

My father drank black Maxwell House from a repurposed Big Gulp cup, the kind with afaded NASCAR logo and a plastic straw he never used. Every morning, long before theworld stirred, he’d fill it to the brim and cradle it between his knees as he drove to work. No cream. No sugar. Just heat, grit, and something close to devotion. On weekends, he used the Grumpy mug I bought him when I was twelve. We were atDisney World, sweating through July, and I picked it out with the kind of glee only achild fee...

I was awaiting my cue, with a few other clowns, when the foul smell of burning canvas infiltrated my senses. Dressed in oversized pants barely held up by my flimsy suspenders and my unshaven face covered in thick white paint. I called myself Weary Willie, a sad hobo clown with a permanent frown. I always got the short end of the stick, yet I never gave up. An important lesson my pa taught me, and one which I impressed on the children who came to the Ringling Circus.