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.
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White Space
Rosaleen Lynch
In the mid-winter window light, I watch you look for the white space on the page, reading the rhythm of the line breaks, the spaces between places, where scenes are set, paragraphs typeset, and characters speak, and follow the return through the margins, guided to the next idea, finding understanding in the meaning created by these symbols in the text, punctuated by a pause, perhaps an intake of breath or hesitation, and savour how the letters join into words but don’t touch.
Across from you, I look out the window at the white space in the mid-winter world, at the neighbourhood and the concrete between the apartment blocks and sidewalks, the high streets and parking lots, the municipal buildings and the playground and skating lake, the squares and cemetery walls, the highways and bridges crossing the city, and back again to the space between windows and doors, between floors, between structures and the white sky, between the earth and outer space, between life and what holds it, like the window glass on these great distances cemented by slabs of silence and cold, touching but not touching.
Between us, you and I, is negative space, like Rubin’s Vase, as we both look but see different aspects, until the turn, when we feel the shift of the earth’s axis as it tilts its furthest from the sun, and the solstice dusk darkens our view, spilling evening shadow on us all, until the white sky begins to fall, dropping in snowflakes on our mid-winter scene, and we watch as snowfall brings light, and white space connects and covers our cityscape and the lacuna between us fills once more with our words, falling like snow, joining us under a blanket of light, to keep vigil, on this, our longest night of the year.
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10,000 Feet of Snow Last Night in Muncie, Indiana
Travis Flatt
Buried. Families gathered in fleece jackets, knit hats, and mittens when fathers opened their front door to let in avalanches that squirted the house full in seconds like a mouthful of whipped cream straight from the nozzle. (Would you like to race toboggans with me, babe? We’ll wear fish bowl helmets up to the stratosphere, silvered with our breath.)
Buried. So many stubborn senior citizens who refused to come back inside, saying they felt young again, stuck out their tongues and let flakes fill them up, one by one, until their throats overflowed like snow cones. (Or, better yet, dogsled up and over the crest?)
Buried. Hundreds of above-ground swimming pools which, for an hour or so, graduated to miniature skating rinks. (Do you dare me to roll a snowball and watch it grow big as the moon, topple the pines like bowling pins?)
Buried. A pair of swans on the bank of Cordy Lake, squabbling over a handful of corn kernels, wings thrown out, beaks nearly locked, who’d be furious to know how romantic they look. (What say we join the snowball wars, but fight on opposite sides? Winner’s got dibs on this last packet of hot cocoa.)
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Ballast
Raymond Brunell
The darkness at two AM on the winter solstice has weight. After seventeen years of pre-dawn shifts, this is the first time it has pushed back against my hands like the dough does—something I could knead in with the salt and yeast. Maybe I already have.
The oven ticks as it heats, yeast sharp in the cold air. I shape six loaves, and when I score the tops with my usual three slashes, I see it there in the split dough: the longest night, worked in.
Tomorrow, people will eat these in kitchens full of winter light, ballast that no one knows they need.
My hands are dark with flour. The loaves are dark with December.
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A New Home
Eileen Frankel Tomarchio
A moon rises over snowfall one night and thinks itself a sham. Its luminance a counterfeit.
No moonlight without sun, it thinks. But snow-light needs no sun. Only itself for the lost to find their way out. A gleam underfoot. Not the insistent slant of a thing so small a child can peel it from the sky outside her window with a pop. Like a mole of old bubble gum pulled from blacktop.
So small the child can hide it in the basement. A moon gone dark as the one we don’t ever see, who likes it down there, where a boiler rumbles on cinderblock feet. Where the child moves it about any soft perch, to prevent bedsores. A bag of potting soil. A cube of Costco paper towels. A tree skirt for an absent tree.
The child tells her mother the moon in the basement is sad. Sad because snow is a blanket. But the moon can never be.
And this the dark moon knows. It is neither light nor blanket. Maybe it is more like an animal, furred and soft-boned and small-stomached. Glad enough to make a nest in the wall behind the child’s bed. To move by touch and crumb, rest on rafter and truss.
While outside, snow banks hard against the high basement windows, crowding and clambering, trying to loosen the thin panes and breach the dark moon’s small dark home, blanket it with its luminance before it dies out and makes dark the warm cinderblocks.
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Between the Years
Jane Yager
In German, the period between Christmas and New Year’s has a special name: zwischen den Jahren. You can put it into English words, between the years, but it’s untranslatable in that we don’t think that way in English: the last days of December just belong fully to the old year, they hold no unique liminality meriting a name. But in German, zwischen den Jahren gives you a looseness in the hinge between old year and new, an extra beat, a few days to not have to be anywhere in time. You feel suspended. A time for turning inward, for divining the future in poured wax or molten tin, for paying close heed to your dreams. A time when the notion of productivity offends, when the old superstitions prohibit housework – no sweeping, no sewing or spinning – and only the unluckiest have to go into the office. You walk the quiet city past shuttered schools and shops. Your neighbors take the regional train out to the countryside to walk in sandy pine woods. Walking feels like the only activity muted enough for these days. Zwischen den Jahren gives you a brief taste of the ancient Roman understanding of the whole stretch between the end of the December and the beginning of March as monthless winter, not worth dignifying on the calendar. At home you have the lamps on at noon, so weak is the fleeting daylight, and this dim midwinter feels like a worn-out time. But when you head outdoors to walk, you stand on the threshold of your building and let out a long exhale of cold breath that lingers, and then it feels crisp and bracing to be in between.
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Anesthesia
Talya Byrd
When I had my wisdom teeth removed, the doctor told me to count back from ten. The anesthesia permeated my body like a thick, warm fog beginning at one tiny point in the crook of my elbow. I barely got to seven before I was awake again and crying for some unknown reason. There was a brief oblivion between seven and waking, but it was infinitesimal, too short to be truly grasped. I merely blinked. But the loss was insurmountable. I could feel it. I was sure I had lived a lifetime in that instant and made countless memories forever unreachable. As the haze of anesthesia wore off, I looked at my mom, who carefully led me to the car through the gray, slushy snow. I didn’t take my eyes off of her as she drove, flattened fields of white blurring past her on the other side of the window. I studied her face, counting each wrinkle and gray hair to determine whether she had aged while I was asleep, but everything looked gray in that light and I couldn’t focus my eyes for long enough to keep count. At home, she led me upstairs, one arm over my shoulders, one hand firmly grasping the rail. She tucked me into bed and encouraged me to sleep with the same breathy voice she used when I resisted bedtime as an overtired toddler. How did I remember that so suddenly? I tried to follow the path the memory took, but it disappeared as quickly as it came. She kissed my forehead with warm, dry lips, and her scent, the air I survived on as a child, led me into that familiar darkness.
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Midwinter, Mid-Michigan
Carol M. Quinn
Gray sky, gray snow, gray light.
Want to watch the cars, says the toddler.
The living room quiet while the baby naps, the monitor gently shushing.
I say, okay.
He climbs onto the couch, leans against the back cushion, eyes wide and shiny as he shovels fishy crackers and bunny grahams from a plastic bowl into his mouth, his body warm against mine. I find his favorite video, and we watch the computer-generated cars. A yellow school bus T-bones a purple Cadillac, then veers into the brush, front fender smashed, wheels spinning. A deep green tank rolls over a light brown sedan, crushing its front hood. A red ball rolls bouncily down a white slide, flattening a series of trucks parked at the base. Over and over, an autotuned voice promises to be waiting when we see the signs and recognize what the rest of our life looks like (looks like). The toddler sucks his thumb, wipes spit and cracker mush on the couch cushion, on my cardigan and my yoga pants. His legs are crossed at the ankles; he wears blue, shark-patterned socks.
Outside, the roads ice over, the plows scrape and beep, the snow tires crunch. Inside, the toddler places a hand on my knee. A rainbow line of racers, one after the next, speed off a silvery bridge. The toddler flexes his toes. The cars hover, suspended, above the water, then one by one they begin to fall.
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Circadian Fracture
Tanya Kornilovich
At six o’clock I start to listen to the day. I hear the whirr of traffic and lawn mowers and asphalt drills and orioles and birch trees rustling in the wind. The sounds existed before, but only in a muffled state, as though I was previously listening underwater. The day ceases to revolve around the automatons, the veiled political subtleties, the senseless cessation to important numbers, the data points that dictate our lives, the successful personas that influence us, the rigor mortis of key performance indicators that exist whether we like them or not, whether we hate them or not. We are told and reminded that the day must revolve around numbers, which are translated into points, into rules, into laws, into social cues. Finally, a break, a turn, a passing.
Life is not just numbers, it’s instinct, and the moment my shoulders unclench and my sternum moves forward, my fingers, so tight and tense they creak, straighten out and move away from the curved position, like I’m loosening my claws. I click the mouse and close the laptop as though I am making a statement and slicing a demon in half. During the day, my muscles atrophy, sticking to my bones like magnets. The stagnation of the simulacra, infecting my body like an internal rot, and the ominous buzzing of the numbers all start to fade. The tension of the day fractures my skull and I open, letting the breadth of possibility ooze inside.
The day ripens into evening and morphs into a welcome creature that leads me to a clearing. The clearing is reserved for feeding my lovers, rearranging my belongings, stretching my mind like clay, lying down in the folded blankets on my couch, and hope climbs in, shy and sputtering, germinating in my chest and shooting its branches through my fingertips, and the world unfurls, even as it gets dark, even as I yawn, even as I mourn the day that passed me by. For a moment, for an hour, for an evening, I let my mind swell and my body becomes a liquid, flowing gently onto the hardwood floor and letting gravity decide where I go.
The city breathes and kicks and screams like a newborn. My mother calls me to gossip about forgotten family members. I snack on my friend’s banana bread. A bunny emerges behind an alleyway dumpster. A young couple on a jet ski skim Lake Michigan. My neighbor squints his eyes in the blistering sun as he waves a Puerto Rican flag. I feel the sugar on my teeth with my tongue. Each moment morphs into momentum, distending my muscles from my bones, keeping my organs suspended in liquid and tissue, and making my heart pulse outside of my mouth.
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By the River of Paint & Oil
Joe Karlovec
It’s been six years since I’ve seen snow. Until today. The UHaul is parked in the alley by the elevator. Nine floors up to our new apartment. It’s dark, cold, windy, snowy, and familiar in all the wrong ways. The kids are already getting sniffles. Regret is already sinking in. We haven’t begun to unpack yet. Every moment fills us with deeper regret. It’s the holidays, so our family is eager to see us. Though we can’t even see ourselves. Unrecognizable. We built a life. Then we had to leave it. Lost between two worlds. We don’t know where home is anymore.
My wife decides we should take the kids sledding to clear our thoughts. It’s their first time, so we buy brand new sleds. The plastic round ones. It eases our mind, but only for a moment. I walk my dog next to the river of paint and oil. It’s bitter cold today, but at least the sun is shining. The kids are with me. They get excited when we see some fish in the water. The river is toxic. The fish are all dead. I don’t have the heart to tell them. I keep it to myself as tears fill my eyes. Not swimming. Not thriving. Lifeless. Drifting. Just like us. We break our lease a few months later. Leave in a hurry, to never return.
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Author Bios
Rosaleen Lynch, an Irish community worker, teacher and writer, has work selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 2023, Best Small Fictions 2024 and Best of the Net 2024 and is currently exploring the power of stories to promote social change.
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Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear or are forthcoming in Fractured Lit, Scaffold, Flash Frog, Iron Horse, Bluestem, Cleaver, HAD, 100 Word Story, and other places. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son.
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Raymond Brunell writes fiction about seasonal work, embodied knowledge, and what gets worked into things without noticing. His work has appeared in Moss Puppy Magazine, Across the Margin, Paragraph Planet, and Literary Garage. He lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
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Eileen Frankel Tomarchio lives with her family in a small NJ town, where she’s been a librarian for 18 years. Her writing appears and is forthcoming in OSU The Journal, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn, Peatsmoke Journal, Gooseberry Pie, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. Find her on Bluesky/ X @eileentomarchio and Instagram @gondaline26.
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Jane Yager is a Berlin-based writer and translator originally from California. Her fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Gooseberry Pie, theCoachella Review and the Ekphrastic Review, and her criticism has been published in the Paris Review Daily, the Times Literary Supplement and The Seneca Review. She was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2025 and longlisted for the 2025 Disquiet Fiction Prize. You can find her at janeyager.com.
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Talya Byrd is a writer and artist based out of San Diego. Her interests include Gothic fiction, fashion, surfing, pop-culture, camping, and cooking. She received her B.A. in writing from Wheaton College, IL, where she was the editor-in-chief of the undergraduate literary journal, Kodon. Now she is cultivating her voice and searching for her corner of the literary world.
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Carol M. Quinn’s flash and short fiction have recently appeared in Lost Balloon, Grist, The Tusculum Review, and others. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and, after spending close to a decade teaching in Michigan, currently lives in New York with her family.
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Tanya Kornilovich has been published in The Weightless Review, Scapi Magazine, Chicago Machine, and The Alliance for Jewish Theatre. She is a storyteller and has read at Tuesday Funk and It’s Not Me, It’s You: Stories from the Dark Side of Dating. Her film, Sunday Afternoon was selected for the Neofuturist’s 100 Cooks in the Kitchen Film Festival, She resides in Chicago after a nomadic childhood in Russia, the UK, Germany, California, Oregon, and Ireland.
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Joe Karlovec is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Wilmington, North Carolina. His work explores the metaphysical power of vernacular architecture through its historical, mythological, and sociological context. He has spent the last 10 years developing a nomadic style studio while living in Ohio, Florida, South Carolina, and now North Carolina. Karlovec currently works as the Facilities Coordinator for a museum where he manages the preservation of three historic buildings. His new video work will debut in Korea at the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art in 2026.