A Side of Metamorphosis With Your Coffee, Hon?
The following story was chosen by Simon Rich as the winner of the 2026 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. This story will be performed by an actor this spring. To hear more great short stories performed by great actors subscribe to Selected Shorts wherever you get your podcasts.
The Flamingo Café
There is nothing worse than working breakfast. The breakfast people, they’re in a hurry, they’re usually alone, which means they allow themselves all kinds of behavior, and they are very specific. Dark toast, toast lightly burnt, runny eggs, overcooked eggs, crispy bacon, burnt bacon, bacon on fire.
I bet the lunch people are OK with whatever color the toast is. Not that I would know. And I bet they use whole sentences. Not like the guy who comes in at the peak of the breakfast rush and when he wants more bread he yells, “Hey, Miss! What, bread?” This is how he asks for more bread. It’s not even a sentence. You see what I mean, they would never do this at lunch, not that I would know.
Petie is a waitress who cries all the time. She is four feet ten inches tall and weighs sixteen ounces. You fear for the health of her brittle, little bones, and her hair looks like it is falling out, from stress, probably. Also, she is always apologizing even when things are not her fault. If you step on her foot, she’ll say, “I’m sorry!” If, when she is balancing six plates of eggs Benedict on one arm, you plow into her and send the plates flying, she will say, “I’m sorry!” I worry about Petie all the time. When the Bread Guy yells for more bread, Petie cries. When the manager says the eight-top needs their check, she cries. Every day I think Petie is not going to make it and every day she somehow gets to twelve o’clock and then shows up the next morning with a little less hair, a little less of her dignity.
One day, it’s a mad rush at seven-thirty, every table’s full, everyone’s yelling, and I already smell like fermented ass mixed with bacon grease. I can see Petie starting to tremble. She drops a whole tray of drinks all over the guy at the deuce in the corner—Bread Guy. And now he’s wet and mad. The manager yells at Petie to clean it up and what the hell is wrong with her is she a simpleton or what, and I think this time she’s really going to crack, she’s going to go into shock or have a seizure.
But she goes all stony and serene. She gets taller and her neck gets long and curvy. When she starts to turn pink is when I believe what I am seeing, not sunburned pink, but hot pink. Neon pink in places, lighter pink in others, almost white in others. And the pink—it’s feathers. Petie has pink feathers on her arms and her back that look so soft I want to touch them. They are everywhere but her skinny, white, funny-looking legs. And now she’s standing on one foot. Everyone in the place goes quiet, Bread Guy, the manager, some people have little bits of sausage spilling out of their open mouths. And no one knows what to say because Petie is a seabird in the middle of the diner. I start to cry, and I see other people start to cry too, because what did we do to deserve her, you know? Petie stands there on one foot, the other one tucked up under her proud, pink rump. She turns her beak this way and that like she is looking way off in the distance and she doesn’t care about any of us. And why should she? She is the most magnificent thing in the whole world. And she knows it.
We didn’t know then if Petie would ever turn back into Petie, or if she would turn into a flamingo every time things got hairy, or what it would cost her, or if it would give the place a certain class and maybe people would quiet down at breakfast. We didn’t know that word would get around, or that there would be imitators—the Real Flamingo Café, the Original Flamingo Café—and that we would be OK with that.
But that day, as we started moving again, we moved around her because no one would dare ask a flamingo to bus a dirty table, because we didn’t want to spook the bird, to find out if she could fly. The sound was a puff, a wing seeing what it could do. A pale feather rose. It hovered pink in the light, and we waited, watching, wanting to believe it could last.
