“When Women Walked on Land” by Emily Mathis was chosen by Guest Judge Jim Shepard as the 2nd place winner of the 2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers. Read the story here and then check out this interview in which Emily talks about how to establish the “rules” of a created world, juggling a story with two point-of-view characters, how a terrible dental visit sparked this story, and more!
When Women Walked on Land” is speculative by nature—women are “released” as they shed their human skin and return, as alligators, to the swamps and the marshes around the coast of South Carolina. Presumably this happens elsewhere, when conditions are right. Did you find it was difficult to introduce the so-called “rules” of this story, as you’re also balancing other tricky techniques—multiple POVs, shifting time, etc.?
The first image I had of this story was a man releasing an alligator who is thrashing in the trailer behind his truck as he drives along South Carolina backroads. I knew the alligator had once been a woman, and I knew the man and the woman had once been intimately connected. This piece is my first real venture into speculative so I felt a little wobbly around how to create the world of the story, but I’ve heard advice that if the narration believes the world of the story, the reader will also believe, or accept, the world of the story. So, I knew the women were transforming into alligators, and I felt a lot of energy around the impact of that transformation on different relationships. I really tried to focus on the heat of this story. In a way, I think why the women are transforming, or the specific conditions, is a bit of a mystery, but it is also a mystery for the characters in the story. I found I lost some of the magic if I focused too much on trying to solve that specific mystery and instead tried to accept this reality for these characters in the same way these characters have had to accept this as their reality. From there, I wanted to know what the emotional reality of these characters is as they respond to the mystery of their lives.
What led you to telling this story from both Alice and Alti’s points of view?
Yeah, for a while I thought it was only Alice’s story, and there were versions of the story that were only hers—I never had a version where it was only Alti’s story—but again, I felt a heat or mystery was lost when it was only Alice’s story. Alice, for me, desperately misses her mother, longs for her, and is jaded by the development of the island, which, along with her mother, is the only home she has ever known. I still saw the climax of this story being Alice’s release, but I was struggling to find the tension, or the real stakes, of that release when it was only Alice’s story. In some ways, with Alice being released, she gets a lot of what she wants (possibly, she gets to be with her mother and is returning to an environment that is less developed than the island). However, with Alti, I was more reminded by what has also been lost. I always saw this as, somewhat, of a love story (between many different elements in the story), and for Alti, in particular, he has lost his mother, past, homeland, and returns home perhaps hoping to be able to recreate something which has already been lost and is further lost when Alice is released. Still, despite this, I think there is a form of love, or tenderness, in her ability to allow him to help her be released and his ability to release her.
The story takes risks everywhere with its craft as I’ve noted, but I’m especially interested in the structure: We’ve got two protagonists who have a shared history, but their storylines (in the time of the story, at least) don’t intersect until we’re almost halfway through. Did you try other versions of this story before settling on this approach?
I tried other versions of just Alice, but with Alti being introduced, I don’t think I ever had their storylines intersecting before the halfway point.
I’m curious what sparked this story for you—what was the initial seed of an idea?
I know I said the first image was of the man with the alligator in his trailer, but the initial seed came from how much I dislike the dentist. Growing up, I had braces multiple times, a palette expander, headgear, and dentists (or orthodontists) often talked about me needing jaw surgery to “fix my bite,” but it was ultimately a cosmetic procedure as opposed to medically necessary. I believe they break your jaw in the jaw surgery, which, to me, is quite violent for a cosmetic procedure for a teenager. Anyways, I didn’t have the procedure and forgot about it mostly, but I recently went to a new dentist for a routine check-up—I had no complaints about anything or pain—and I spent about thirty minutes talking through all of my discomfort with dentists with the hygienist, who was wonderful. And then, the dentist comes in and without really asking me what I was experiencing, pretty quickly starts telling me I have a “crazy bite” and the only way to fix it is with jaw surgery. I asked him, are you telling me this for a functional or an aesthetic reason and we had this back and forth, him bringing out a “model” mouth and saying dentists just always want everything to be “perfect,” and me saying, I didn’t verbalize any complaints or concerns about my jaw or bite so he must be saying all this for aesthetic reasons. He ends up apologizing and says we “got off on the wrong foot,” but keeps referring to my bite as “crazy,” and keeps telling me about his brother-in-law who “also has a crazy bite” and lives “just fine,”—I guess you could say he really pissed me off.
After, I started looking at pictures of alligators. For a while, my father lived on one of the islands near Charleston where alligators are pretty close to people’s houses, so maybe the image was already near in my brain—but I looked at these alligators and I thought, wow, alligators have “crazy bites,” but it makes them so powerful, their bite makes them able to bite through bone and limbs and if you tried to “fix” their crazy bite so it fits into an aesthetic idea of perfection, you would take away their bite’s functional power. My initial idea around women turning into alligators is a resistance to a society always telling women to fix our bodies in order to achieve someone else’s aesthetic ideal, and a consideration of what functional power might be lost in the prioritization of an aesthetic appeal.
I see this fundamentally as a story about patterns and cycles, especially with Alti leaving and then returning back home, much as the women return as alligators to the water. Do you think there’s anything that might break the cycle? Do you think the cycle needs to be broken?
Hm, that’s a good question. For me, this story is also about our relationship to nature, or the untamed/wild, and the freedom to live as one’s true nature in a society with rigid ideals. Perhaps it’s a quieter element in this story, but I see the impact of development on the island as significant in the sanitization of spaces, bodies, places, and the forcing of an environment to conform into someone else’s view of what is aesthetically pleasing and what is most economically advantageous. In my mind, there was a world on the island, before the golf course and the development of the island, where the women, after they were released, had more of a co-existence with the people left “on land,” and less of a total severing of ties, which I think is happening in the present-day of the story. I don’t know if a return to the state of co-existence is possible, and if not, then no, I don’t think the cycle needs to be broken.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a novel version of this story, which follows three generations of women on the island—Alice, her mother, and grandmother—and each of their journeys navigating this transformation, and how it impacts their relationships with each other, the island, and the men who are left on land.
Interviewed by Cole Meyer