The night shift at the rest stop smells of diesel and boiled peanuts. The vending plaza hums behind me, its fans and fluorescent lights working harder than the people inside. I sweep the tiled floor in small arcs, the broom whispering over chip crumbs and cigarette ash. The mop bucket waits beside the door, metal dented, water clouded by a day of other people’s shoes. A paper map curls on the brochure rack, its folds cutting Florida clean through the gulf.

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.

Before I can write, I have to light a candle. Not a special candle. Not one blessed by a nineteenth-century poet or poured by a woman in Hudson, New York, who calls herself a scent alchemist. I don’t need soy. I don’t need beeswax. I don’t need a wooden wick that crackles like a tasteful fireplace in a Nancy Meyers movie. It just has to smell good.

Last year, I made more money from my writing than I ever had before, and it came from one change: submitting to writing contests. I don’t pretend contest winnings can replace a full-time income, and they haven’t for me. But contest money has helped in concrete ways, and it gave me a takeaway even more useful than a check: momentum.

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.

The lake rose without lifting its voice.Morning still arrived with birdsong,with coffee cooling on stoves,with children sent out to fetch waterfrom water already deciding otherwise. The dike helduntil it didn’t.That is how structures fail,how faith does too. A wind came sideways,dragging sugarcane flat as scripture.Houses unbuttoned themselves.Tin roofs learned how to flyand did not come back. People ran toward higher groundcarrying what fit in arms:a clock that would not be wound again,a Bible...

The storm reached Jacksonville long after the newscasters said it would. All afternoon the sky over the Westside stayed bright and blue, the kind of blue that fooled people into thinking weather would skip the city the way visitors skipped the industrial stretch along the river. Cars crowded the Winn Dixie parking lot on Cassat Avenue even though rain had not fallen yet. Mothers hurried through the sliding doors with coupons in hand. Kids held on to the sides of carts,...

​The burner won’t light.​She presses the knob, waits for the faint click-click-click, but nothing catches. Just the stale scent of gas. She clicks it off, clicks it back. Nothing.​The pot is already filled. Tap water. Slightly cloudy. Half a box of store-brand pasta waits beside it like a promise she can’t quite keep.In the other room, her son arranges plastic soldiers into...

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.

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."

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’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...

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.

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.

“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 night the sirens came, my mother was labeling leftovers.She used blue painter’s tape and a black marker that bled through plastic.Rice-Monday. Chicken-Tuesday.She pressed each lid twice, firm, like she could seal time inside the refrigerator. Outside, cicadas rattled in the palms and the air smelled faintly of salt and wet asphalt.When the sirens started, she did not look up.“Probably a wreck on US One,” she said.I stood at the sink with my hands in dishwater gone cloudy with grease.