This month’s flash essay contest was a very special treat — only available to attendees of our “live” 2025 Memoir Prize party. Inspired by Andrew Printer’s winning essay, “My Absolutely Chaotic Adventures at Sea During the Summer of 1984,” we asked you to tell us about a time when sh*t went wrong in a body of water. Thank you to all who joined and all who submitted. It was a joy, as always, to read your — in this case, very! — hilarious stories. Check out the winning mini essay below. Eleven-year-old me woke up on Christmas Eve morning beyond excited. Santa would be making a live appearance at midnight to deliver presents to me, my sisters and all our cousins who were coming over to celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes, an Italian Christmas Eve culinary tradition our big family partook in every year. Lots of fish and seafood dishes, prepared in different ways. One of these was capitone frito, battered and fried eel, usually eaten by the older members of our family for its fatty, meaty texture. The kids never touched it.But before all that fun came the chores. As I was heading downstairs to our laundry room for the mop and pail, I heard squeals of panic from adult voices. As I got closer, I heard my Zio Pasquale swearing and cursing in Italian and his wife, Zia Domenica, shrieking and yelling, “fermalo!” Stop him! When I got to the door, I noticed water on the floor and my aunt and uncle scrambling like chickens. Inside our two laundry tubs were four or five long, black eels swimming in fast, ferocious circles.Before I could register that our dinner was still alive, and that my uncle was here to kill the live eel before my mother cooked it, he called for help. One of them had escaped. We watched it slither beneath the washing machine and come out behind the dryer. We tried blocking it in with a laundry basket and swinging the mop at it. The slippery convict had us sweating — until it eventually ran out of steam right on the laundry room floor and was captured by the hands of his slaughterer.No one carried that tradition on.PS: Make sure you don’t miss any of our flash essay contests and calls for pitches by subscribing to Narratively Academy, our community for writers and authors.Gina Luongo is a Toronto writer whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail First Person, Motherwell, Modern Loss, The Mighty, and Mothers Always Write. She is the author of a self-published memoir and two novels. She works as a special education consultant and lives at her local library.