In second place, “When Women Walked on Land,” which partakes of some of Angela Carter’s and Karen Russell’s strains of magical realism. Its originality, though, for me resides in the way it substitutes for the former’s psychoanalytic bent and the latter’s playfulness its twin protagonists’ mordant acceptance of whatever stunning transformations are going to come down the pike. Both protagonists have been through a lot, still have some of their compassion intact, and do what they can to accommodate their fellow beings even as they prepare to accept their isolation. —Guest Judge Jim Shepard
Alice
On the eighteenth anniversary of her mother’s release, Alice works an overnight shift at Kroger’s. It’s hard for her to explain, even to herself, why she keeps the Kroger’s shift, but it feels good to be efficient in something which does not have to do with her body. Alice has been dancing for as long as her mother’s been gone. She doesn’t think the two are related. Her mother was released. She started dancing. That’s just how life happened.
At the club, all the men are golfers. Two nights ago, she sat between a pair of them on an upstairs couch in a silver and black bikini. The lights were pink. The couch was tan and leather with three cushions. The men were fully clothed in khaki shorts and orange visors. They both sat as if they were moving toward the center of something and Alice sat, or really leaned back, so that each of her shoulders was pressed against a different man’s chest. The men were both drinking glass bottles of Bud Light. She grabbed each bottle by the neck, one in each hand, curled her fingers around the shaft and made a motion as if she were swinging.
“Like this?” she said. “Is that how you hold it?”
And then, one man told her to grip it tighter, and the other told her to grip it looser, and then, they were both looking down the bridge of her nose. One of them bit his lip while the other’s tongue traced a spiral. The air was heavy and thick with saliva. Alice felt something like teeth growing inside of her, just below her belly, something sharp and jagged, and she held a finger to the lips of the man whose tongue traced a spiral. The soft skin of his mouth met the scaled skin of her pinky finger. Her bones hardened.
* * *
The women on the island hadn’t always turned into alligators. There was a time, before the sand dunes eroded and the lighthouse fell into the ocean, before the cargo ships passed through on the way to Charleston and rerouted the alligator’s nesting, before the bridge connected the island to I-95, before the developers and the golf courses and the Starbucks and the uniform navy blue stucco of all the houses and the carefully planted Palmettos—before all of that, on the island, the women were women, and the alligators were alligators, and there was a clear and distinct separation.
No one knows exactly why the women started turning into alligators and there were plenty of people who still didn’t believe it was happening. These people said there were plenty of reasons a woman might go missing which didn’t have anything to do with a female body transforming into an alligator and crawling into the marshes.
But for Alice, when she was twelve years old, her body grew lumps from her chest, her hips widened as if her bones had expanded, and the skin on her face became red and blotchy, dry and full of acne, before it glistened and softened. At the age of thirteen, her body became a stranger. When all of this happened, men started looking at her, women started glaring, and she had a feeling she had lost something, a part of herself she hadn’t known could be discarded. When you learn your skin can change, your bones rearranged, it becomes less clear which parts of yourself you can trust as solid. You were once a girl, an innocent, and then you became something strange, a woman, a dangerous creature who did not understand its own power. And so, to Alice, the idea of transforming again into something wild, beastly, even farther from human, did not seem beyond the realm of what the body might imagine.
During childbirth, the doctors had to cut open Alice’s mother’s body. They tried to just move her organs, but then, a nurse in blue scrubs had to actually place her mother’s organs on a table next to her body in order for the doctor to get a good grip on Alice. Alice’s mother always said it was like Alice believed herself to be another one of her mother’s organs.
Alice never knew exactly how close was too close to be to her mother. As a child, she curled against her mother’s lap, head on chest, her skin pressed against her mother’s skin, and a cold brick floor beneath them. The room they were in was a sunroom. Glass surrounded them. Outside it was nighttime, vast, and full of darkness. Alice’s mother’s mother always said a mother’s body is the first piece of Earth we land on as humans.
* * *
After her mother was released, Alice sometimes had a strange sensation in her fingers. It was a deep sense of longing, wanting to dig her fingers into mud, but she could never find the patch of Earth her fingers longed for. In the upstairs room of the club with the leather couch, Alice gave lap dances. The golfers sat with their legs spread in their khaki shorts and she hovered over them, ass inches over legs, and her face staring forward. She was of two minds and two bodies, but when she curled her fingers along the base of the men’s necks, she sometimes felt the reemergence of longing. It was a knuckle wanting to be popped, a joint cracked, a bone reset. It was something inside of her which wanted to be expanded.
“Ow!” the men said. “Ow! You scratched me!”
Alice wanted skin to be skin, for organs to be organs, and for the bodies of strangers to be the same as her mother’s. She hated how these men’s bodies were always so unfamiliar.
Alti
Alti’s mother was released three years after Alice’s. When it happened, he and Alice were both twenty-one years old, and he did not believe himself to be in love with Alice because the world was vast and wild, and Alice, the island, his mother—these were merely slivers of the totality he imagined. His real life was something which was waiting to happen. There was a whole state, a whole country you could drive across as long as you knew to point yourself westward. If you did this, you could drive for a whole day and never once see the ocean. All you had to do was leave the island, drive your truck over the bridge to Charleston, roll up your windows, plug your nose, not think about the smell of salty water and marshes, and convince yourself you had always loved the mountains.
Alti drove and drove because he did not want to think about his mother. His mother was his mother. He had been brought into this world through her, but once he was through her, the world kept expanding and he could not return to her, even if he wanted. When his mother had been released, she headed toward the marshes and had not turned back to look at him. He felt she had made her decision—she was something other than a mother. He drove until he reached the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. Land stretched outwards and you could walk across a dead ocean, shores which had eroded and transformed, but remained standing. There was no ocean and only one alligator, as far as Alti knew, in all of Colorado.
Mostly, Alti tried not to think about the alligator advertised in the wood cabin in the middle of the high desert. Mostly, he tried to pretend it was a gimmick. A cartoon. That it was just some tourist attraction, like UFO sightings, and that if he were to actually pass into the cabin in the high desert, there was no way there would really be an alligator in a small pool, blue lining, chlorinated, its nostrils just about the water, flaring, and its golden iris staring.
* * *
Because Atli had high cheekbones, a broad back, deep-set almond eyes, and a surprisingly warm smile, he never had a problem with women. One of them was rich and from Denver, and he didn’t think he was in love with her either, but truth be told, with her, life was just a little bit easier. He was occasionally acutely aware of the untethering of himself to any blood relatives or known history. It felt nice to tether himself to someone with blood ties and money. It felt nice to tether himself to someone who had tethering—even though he knew, deep down, this wasn’t his money, this wasn’t his blood or history, and so, in this version of his life, he would always be capable of leaving.
Alti and the girl from Denver never talked about his family, but he did with old man who had given him a job in construction. This old man called him Charlie—for Charleston—and Alti found himself unable to explain that his accent was from the islands and not from Charleston. He was realizing the farther he got from home, the more he became a sort of outline instead of a specific person. In Colorado, he became Charles, Charlie for short, and Alti disappeared. He was untethered and seemed devoid of history, so it was easy for the girl from Denver to imagine that she could write him into her own story. It’s what he had wanted in a way, this sense of freedom toward reinvention. He didn’t know why, or when, freedom started to feel more like an erasure.
When he drove with the girl from Denver, he passed the sign for the alligator and the girl’s eyes never lingered, and if she noticed that his did, she never asked him.
“You know my name isn’t Charles,” he found himself saying once.
“Huh, no? What is it then?”
“Aldous” he said. “Back home people call me Alti.”
The girl from Denver was in the passenger’s seat with one knee bent upward and a foot planted on the seat. She was spreading and unspreading her toes and sticking her fingers in between the webbing. She liked to microdose mushrooms and was often hard to reach. When Alti told her the truth about his name, she acted like it was completely natural and normal for there to exist a reality in which he would be known as an entirely different person. She kept spreading and unspreading her toe webbing.
“Aldous,” she said finally. “Alti.” And when she said it, he found himself smiling. But then she never brought it up again and he didn’t know how to go about explaining that Alti is what he wished people would call him. He remembered a kid in elementary school who, in second grade, decided he wanted to go by his middle name, Steven, and then, in fourth grade he wanted to go back to his first name, Matthew. Alti knew that kid all his life on the island and never knew what he was supposed to call him. He hesitated every time he saw him. Sometimes, he saw the kid’s mother because the kid ran cross-country, and she would be sitting and watching while he ran around the racetrack. Back then, Alti was a goalie on the soccer team, and so he did a lot of waiting in the field at the center of the track. He saw the kid’s mother clapping, but he never could hear what name she called him.
Alti was thirty-five years old when he broke into the log cabin where they kept the alligator in the high desert. They kept her in a small, above ground, circular pool. At night, there was a top to the pool which was covered and locked. He didn’t know how the alligator could breathe. He broke the lock with a crowbar lifted the pool lid, and then ran like the alligator was chasing after him back to his truck, which was waiting with all its doors wide open. When he was sure the alligator wasn’t chasing him, Alti watched and waited in his truck, remembering how his mother thrashed in the trailer behind his truck and how he was so convinced she would run after him that he had hidden when he finally opened the trailer. He hadn’t expected her to head straight for the marshes without even looking for him.
In the high desert, he finally went back into the log cabin and saw the alligator was floating in the pool water, kind of peacefully, but kind of like it didn’t even know where it would run if it could, like the act of running was something it had forgotten. Where was it going to go? An alligator in the high desert? How had it even gotten there? Who had brought it? It was then Alti realized he was living a life he wasn’t built for. He started driving eastward.
* * *
When Alti and Alice see each other in Kroger’s, it’s been fourteen years. There’s a force between them. Neither of them really knows if it’s attraction, love, or just the weight of a shared history. The missing pages of a story. Neither of them are exactly surprised the other doesn’t have a child, isn’t married, or isn’t in some other way wedded to a new family, a new story, a new identity. They both know the other is waiting for something, but they also know what it is they are waiting for is a past version and so, they will never find it, and they will move through the world alone, but also tethered, and still searching.
Alti first sees Alice in the frozen food section of Kroger’s. She’s in a gray work shirt. A silver name tag. He notices the lumps of her body beneath the fabric. She is packing Stouffer’s lasagna. He doesn’t know how to approach her. It’s strange to approach a person who once felt like an extension of his own body. An appendage. He wants to skip the approaching and already the two of them be of one body.
“Can I help you?” Alice asks. She is leaned over the frozen Stouffer’s, facing the freezer, but has always known when men are watching. She sees straight back into the freezer. Ice and gray concrete. She has an urge to crawl over the Stouffer’s, into the freezer, and lay her body against the coolness of concrete. Her body is changing but her body has always been changing. She has never believed herself to be a static figure. She is the same as her mother and her mother’s mother, who were like the ocean, shapeshifters who rose and fell by invisible currents until they caused a total reshaping. She shuts the freezer and sees Alti’s face reflected. It doesn’t surprise her. Men are always leaving, running off, and then returning and assuming the things they’d forgotten had remained in safekeeping.
What Alti wants, more than anything, is to lie next to Alice in the twin-sized bed in his mother’s basement. Salmon-colored sheets. A navy comforter. Wooden walls. No windows. A yellow-tiled bathroom. Blue carpeting. His mother upstairs asleep. Outside are weeping willow trees. A wooden fence. On the street outside, a truck he long ago sold, but somehow, still there. His mother’s house. To stare at his mother’s house from the road and know just inside, through the walls, she would be in there, watching TV alone, and it was up to him who would stay and who would leave.
“Where are you staying?” Alice asks him.
“Quality Inn.”
“You like it there?”
He shrugs. “It’s a place to go.”
She doesn’t ask what he’s doing here or where he’s been, but the absence of the questioning is different than the girl from Denver’s had been. What is he doing there? He has the feeling Alice smells it on his skin.
* * *
When the women on the island started changing, people at first called it a mutation. Like maybe it was something from the cargo ships, oil spills, a pollutant which had gotten under the women’s skin. Or maybe it was the erosion of the dunes. The disruption of alligator nests. Maybe it was something in the water. The air. The food. It had to be a mutation which was turning mothers into monsters, scaling their skin, sharpening teeth, hardening backs, protruding bone. A mutation which was leading them into the marshes, making them not once look back, and propelling them to swim outward.
How to turn the women back? How to get the women back? How to get the mothers and wives and sisters and girlfriends and friends and grocery store workers and dancers back on land? How to make them women again?
The women didn’t see it as a mutation. The women thought: the body responds to threats, nature adapts, and the body fights back. The men thought evolution was a linear path out of the ocean, toward land, walking on two feet, the men would never crawl again, their heads were held high. It was only the women who looked around this land, down at their own hands, their own skin, then looked toward the water, thought of mothers, wombs, and how sometimes intelligence was about humbling yourself, knowing when it was time to crawl, and that it was okay to say you wanted to start life over again.
* * *
The Quality Inn is on the far back of the island like it’s a thing the rest of the island would prefer not to know, or not to see. It’s mostly all ship and dock workers who stay here. No one really vacations on the island. It’s not that kind of place. Transient. It’s more a second home and golf retirement community now. It wasn’t like that when Alti and Alice were kids. The Quality Inn is a stucco building under the bridge. Alice goes at nighttime. She drives beneath the bridge, all rust, metal, and overgrown weeds. The containers on the cargo ships are faded shades of blues and reds. White lettering from companies she doesn’t know. There are two men smoking on the dock. The water is black with oil, and a rainbow metallic sheen glistens along the shore. The men are dressed in all black except the glow of yellow safety vests on their chests. They stand next to each other, their backs to the water, and the ember of their cigarettes are pressed against their lips. Their mouths glow like eyes taking her in.
Alti opens the door and stands in the frame of room 303 before Alice has knocked. He read once that sharks recognize each other by vibrations in the water. That they know each other are there without turning their heads. He doesn’t really know if it is like that between him and Alice, or, between the two of them, who is the shark, her or him.
She is in a long, fur-type coat that completely covers her arms and legs. It’s February. A little windy but not that cold. Not fur-coat-cold. He wonders where she got it, why, and if she wears it other times. He’s in an orange T-shirt and the old black dress pants he used to wear when he worked as a waiter at a sushi restaurant in Charleston. She used to smell the soy sauce and ginger on his fingertips. He doesn’t wear a belt. His hip bones are slightly jutted out. He leans against the door frame, his weight on one foot, hip sticking out, and laughs.
“Why are you dressed so fancy?” he asks.
She rolls her eyes and says, “This is just how I dress.” She steps inside. He shuts the door. The motel room is suddenly very yellow. He doesn’t know what to do.
“Turn off the lamp,” she says. Only the fluorescent light above the bed is on now. It makes the room feel very cold, but she takes her coat off. She is wearing a one-piece spandex body suit which covers her from head to toe in a second skin of green and black. The pattern is scaled. Her hair is very long. Her shoulders are pulled back and wide, chest high. There is something very full about her body. Supple. A strength coiled beneath her skin. He wants to press his fingers against her. Into her. He can’t help but think of how much she looks just like her mother did, and his mother too, just before they were released and went back in.
She puts the coat on the armchair by the bed. He turns and folds it, so he has a reason to touch it, but then he doesn’t know what to do with it, so he sits on the foot of the bed with the coat folded in his lap. She sits in the armchair. One leg crossed over the other. She is wearing low black heels and is slightly kicking her leg like she is waiting for something, but he doesn’t know if it is something which is supposed to come from him.
“Do you want to smoke?”
She shakes her head.
He takes the coat from his lap, sets it on the bed, and starts rolling a joint. It would be easiest if they would just have sex. They started having sex with each other when they were both fourteen years old. It was too young because it was like the patterning of sex with each other got cemented into their bodies while every other part of themselves was still gooey and unformed, particularly the thoughts in their head. Sex between them then was something very young, but also ancient and pre-language. But now they are old and dressed, and don’t know how to return to the versions of themselves they had once been.
“How was out West?” she asks. He inhales sharply as he pulls his lips on the joint. He puffs his chest upward as he holds the smoke. She studies him. There are some bodies, she thinks, you can’t unknow. She feels a sharpness beneath her skin.
“Out West was out West,” he says. He doesn’t mention the alligator, the Sand Dunes, the old man, the girl from Denver, or the way she studied the webbing of her toes. They seem like unnecessary details. The point of them was they led him back here. He hits the joint again. She watches his chest, the way his collarbones lift, and there is that sharpness again, which makes her stand, walk over to him, spread her legs wide, and lower herself onto his lap. He sits on the bed, and her legs are wrapped around his waist. They both laugh a little. It is not a surprise to them they have ended up like this. It was just a question of how to get from that to this. He touches the back of her bicep. The bodysuit is slick and cold in his hand.
“What is this?” he asks.
* * *
When their mothers started changing, their skin became dry and flakey, and their mothers stood in the bathroom and peeled off layer after layer of human flesh. They held this flesh in their hands and didn’t bleed. After all the flesh was gone, their mothers stared directly into their mirrors and didn’t scream. Their mothers had always known, deep down, the reality of who they were underneath.
In the motel, Alti runs the bath. The tub is small, blue, and rectangular. He sits on the toilet and leans his hand into the water to test the temperature. In the periphery of his vision, he sees a child in the bath. A red cup of water he might pour over the child’s head and when the water dribbles over the child’s skin, the child’s eyes close. It is just an image though. It isn’t his real life—he knows.
When Alice walks into the bathroom, Alti stays seated on the toilet. The bathroom is too small for both of them to stand. The standing seems more important for her than him. There’s a built-in counter which is white on top with a blue marble pattern underneath. There’s a mirror over the counter which covers, almost, the entirety of the wall. Alti’s eyes move to the four corners of the mirror, to the small circles where the mirror has been drilled in. There’s a wall behind the mirror. He wonders how far into this wall someone had to drill for the mirror to go in.
When Alice peels back the skin of her face, she starts underneath her chin and pulls upward. Alti’s eyes go from the mirror to the back of her head. Her hair still hangs soft and long. In truth, when the human flesh of Alice’s face is gone, it isn’t really anymore, or less, different to him than watching her get undressed.
When she enters the tub, she lies on her back, and her breathing is quick and shallow. The water from the faucet is flowing fast but not filling up the tub, not covering Alice, and he worries perhaps there is something wrong with the drain. He takes a washcloth and shoves it over the drain. When he does, the water in the tub rises faster and when it covers Alice’s scales, it’s like her body opens. He thinks of stems. Her breath changes. Her heartrate slows. He holds her hand for as long as he can and when her eyes close, he knows it is time to go. When she opens them again, he will just be a man, flesh and bone, a threat, predator or prey, but something which, to her, will no longer be known.
The bad thoughts happened when he released his mother, so they shock him less when they happen again. He’s driving down loose and sandy roads. His truck lifts and bounces over sand and stone. There are rows and rows of low shrubs. A hunting platform and a canopy of trees are over his head. On the horizon, a sliver of red is starting to show. He could get a gun. He could have shot her in the head, taken the human flesh she had shed, and—but then what? Hung it over a mannequin? Asked the girl from Denver to wear it like a dress? Framed it over his bed?
The new skin, on his mother and on Alice, is sharp and cold. It’s nothing like the hands which had once held him in his bed. When he reaches the point where he released his mother, he backs up, turns the truck around, so the truck bed is facing the marsh. When he gets out of his truck and walks to the trailer, his feet slip in the sand. There is more red and yellow, a little bit of blue, on the horizon. The darkness of night has moved somewhere over, and past, his head. He feels different than he once did.
She is lashing in the trailer. Her body thrown to one side and then the other. The trailer and truck both lift and rock slightly depending on which side she is on. He wonders about the alligator in the high desert, who had brought it there? And if he bought a small pool, how long it would take for her to realize there was no reason to run because there was no ocean left?
There’s a thump against the trailer. A part of him wishes he had a gun. A part of him hates that he wishes he had a gun. What if she is just bigger and stronger than the alligator in the pool? He opens the trailer and runs.
Back in his truck, chest leaned over the steering wheel, his heart races. He feels something ancient in himself like his body is doing what it had always known was needed to be done. He puts the key in the ignition but doesn’t turn it. Forward, through the brushes, there is no clear path, just stone, sand, and the tire marks he has already left. In the side mirror, he glances back. When he opened the trailer, she had barreled out, faster than he thought he could run. She wasn’t interested in him though. He knew this. He was just standing between her and the place her body could expand. In the side mirror, he’s a little surprised to see her still standing on the edge of the marsh. Her four feet are on the ground. The front two are already in the marsh. The back two are still in the sand. Her body is low and long. She takes one step into the marsh, and then another, until there is only sky where her body had been.
She does not look back. He wasn’t expecting her to, but still, he can’t help but stay in the truck, staring, and studying the surface of the water until it is devoid of the ripples she has left.
Emily Mathis is a writer in Brooklyn whose work has recently appeared in, or is forthcoming in, The Masters Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. She reads for Epiphany, is a member of The Writer’s Studio at The Center for Fiction, and is the former fiction editor of The Greensboro Review. She is seeking publication for her prose collection, THE WEIGHT OF WATER, which was a finalist for Iron Horse Literary Review’s First Book Prize (2026) and a semi-finalist for River Teeth’s Literary Nonfiction Book Prize (2025), the Hudson Prize (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) and the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize (Seneca Review, 2025). Her work has been supported through Vermont Studio Center, NES (Iceland), Tin House, and Sewanee Writer’s Conference.