In these days between solstice and the new year we bring you a gathering of writers responding to the turn of seasons and time. Today we are pleased to share writing by Mizuki Yamamoto, Catherine Reedy, Kendra Cardin, Gareth E. Rees, Catherine Gammon, Erin Keane, Kleopatra Olympiou, Lleyton Michael Kane, and Warren Stoddard II.

In these days between solstice and the new year we bring you a gathering of writers responding to the turn of seasons and time. Today we are pleased to share writing by Rosaleen Lynch, Travis Flatt, Raymond Brunell, Eileen Frankel Tomarchio, Jane Yager, Talya Byrd, Carol M. Quinn, Tanya Kornilovich, and Joe Kalovac.

The man was with his seven-year-old daughter, Jamie, when the doorbell rang. He opened the door. It was their cleaner. She said, ‘Is that your dead dog?’  ‘No,’ he said reflexively. She looked confused. ‘It’s on the road.’ Jamie’s mouth wobbled. The man said to the cleaner and to Jamie, but mostly to Jamie, ‘I…

Sunday, and Hunter wanted pancakes. The coffee machine gurgled and sighed like a sick horse. “There’s no syrup,” Liz said. Denis poured a cup and looked out the window at the backyard, which was too hopeless to even begin fixing up: loose netting, rusted metal rods, a square patch of dirt dug up for what…

I volunteered for the firing squad because no woman had ever done it before. At least the assistant warden said he couldn’t remember any. The records were murky. They kept them classified and low-tech, and you needed a special key and four forms in order to get a look, which was probably for the best.…

I sit in the bathtub my mother gave birth to me in and tuck my knees to my chest. It’s the kind of bathtub that has little feet. The room is small and echoing; my heartbeat clunks in my forehead. I once watched something on TV about a woman who said she remembered being born.…

The morning after I hit the fox, I woke up with a screaming headache. My wife was shuffling around the kitchen, closing the windows and curtains, covering her ears.  “Can’t you hear it?” she said. “The moaning?” I stopped and listened, but all I could hear was the throb of my pulse in my head,…

I wallow home from the nearby café, my pancake belly leading, my sausage belly thudding with each step, my eggs over easy belly yoking my intestines, liver, kidneys, in grease—solid, thick, yellow. Crow follows me in the rain, cawing. When I stop for a break to catch my breath, he perches on a low oak…

It was my forty-first birthday and I was angry. Out for blood. My husband Del had given me a knife and a pillow, gifts that proved he’d been paying attention.  The gifts were wrapped in shiny paper and skillfully tied with matching silk ribbons. Wrapped by some sales associate, I imagined. Some young woman who…

They led a half dozen of us into the sacristy and told us that the world had ended. It was the pastor, the deacon, and a couple of the Eucharistic ministers, and they were passing a very official looking letter back and forth between them as they spoke. It was clear they were trying to…

The day he gets the tattoo changes everything. He hasn’t stolen the book. All the matron has to do is call the librarian, who loaned it to him—without a card—knowing how much he loves reading. Instead, she accuses him of theft. When he refuses to confess, she resorts to her preferred punishment: whacking the insides…

There was a spot of blood on the dog’s right ear. Scout, Sheila’s pride and joy, was so unnerved by her erratic driving that his little body flitted about only long enough for her to notice the red dot in her rearview mirror, but not long enough for her to snatch him up and examine…