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.
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How Far
Mizuki Yamamoto
The gull flies into the abyss with a cry. For a moment, the darkness is more than night and I feel everything, even the numb tips of my fingers. Then, the night returns and beyond the fractal of branches I see a streetlamp, its light a facsimile for the moon in a clouded sky. It casts at my feet, a concentric orange glow. The seagull and the abyss are gone. Instead, in the veil between the glow and night, I see my obaachan. Not her face, but her hands. Here, she says, a gleaming mikan in her hand. Do you want me to peel it for you? Before I can answer, her hands return from the shadows of the street. Here. The citrus scent fills my head. In her palms lie small orange slices, the pith carefully peeled, falling away like gossamer. I am reaching for it as I remember — this will be her first winter alone, pacing a room at the memory-care facility. The sweet juice fills my mouth. Here, she says again, a second round mikan pressed into her wrinkles, have another. I think of her shuffle, never still, engraving a path between the kitchen and family, asking, Anyone still hungry? Now, look at her, how far she’s come. Her feet shuffling across the ocean to find me six-thousand miles away, her back arced like the invisible moon. Alone in the darkness, I find myself reaching for the sweetness, again and again. Have another, she says. Beyond, I imagine I hear the beating of wings.
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Northern Lights
Catherine Reedy
I tell my family to come see. They’re on the couch, each child screen-glazed, my four-year-old naked from the waist down. Motionless, tangled in a blanket greyed by dog hair and dirt, they are like prehistoric insects posed in magma-thick amber, exoskeletal wings spread, spindle-thin antennae clogged in age-hardened tree sap. I hurry them along so we don’t miss it. My husband’s a good enough sport, so we slather prescription strength hydrocortisone on our two-year-old’s raw eczema patches, squeeze sock-less feet into shoes, and parade them down our empty suburban street. The twelve-year-old doesn’t see anything and, worse, she’s cold. Look here through the screen, I tell them, and the camera exposes the hidden colors. Without, only a light grey horizon, like a cloud lit by spotlights. Within, a green halo, a galactic core of turquoise deepening through scattered interstellar dust. They are amazed, even the preteen. It’s here, it’s gone, an x-ray or a magic trick. Something sticks, though, off camera: A scuffed pink plaque that’s really storming plasmatic radiation, solar winds bearing down upon the invisible fields of attraction and repulsion surrounding the planet. I have to get this, the three holding hands under the radiant sky.
“Okay, freeze,” I say, but I don’t catch them in time.
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Eve
Kendra Cardin
Beneath the porch’s twinkle-lit glow, I swig my fizzing stars. Last winter’s clearance, a case of sparkling cider swiped from the pantry, tops popped in the nick of time. Inside, Ella and Louis sing, spin the living room warm, cause baby, it’s cold outside. Another guzzle, and my cheeks honeycrisp pink. Nana’s final creation keeps the chill at bay, stripes of red and cream cotton wrapped round my neck like popcorn and cranberry garland, woven cozy and thick with the last few flicks of her arthritic fingers. The record skips. Now Ella asks a question, wonders what I’m doing this evening. She’s not the only one who wants to know. My family’s laughter and chatter spills out from the house. A carousel of bourbon balls and champagne. Sequins and blinking strings of lights. Scrutinizing eyes. The persistence of mistletoe. Peace comes in bubbly apple-sweet waves, in the snow-dusted brick nipping at my thighs, keeping me awake. On the cheer of midnight, I raise a toast to December’s undemanding moon. My only kiss, a bottle to my lips.
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A Matter of Darkness and Light
Gareth E. Rees
At this time of year, the low winter sun comes in hard through the Venetian blinds of the front room window. I sit quietly on the sofa and observe golden beams slice across the sideboard, rug, mantelpiece, and an abstract painting of a nuclear power station, imbuing them with unfamiliar hues and textures. Dust motes become visible, suddenly, glittering like stars on a dark night as sunlight reanimates the hidden life of the room. Skin cells and fabric fibres, long ago detached from their host bodies, travel on invisible air currents through the house, just as the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas drifts through our solar system from an unknown origin at the edge of the Milky Way, billions of years older than Earth. In a universe dominated by dark matter, all we see are fragments. Dust that momentarily catches the light on a winter’s day before the sun goes down.
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Insomnia Morning
Catherine Gammon
The ache in her back made her think of death, lead in the lung—her left lung, she thought. Oblivion creeping up from inside. But morning came, and movement, and plenty of breath. Still here, the hungry cat, light not yet rising through oak and pine, birdsong overcome by the undertone of traffic rumbling along the 376. Even a horn, acceleration. Where are the crows? she wonders, rare visitors. She has wanted to invite them, to befriend them, but they remain elusive. Meanwhile, Steller’s jays and robins, cardinals and wrens, never so many as there used to be, never again so raucous. The world fading out, she thinks, if not the light. If not yet the light. By 5 a.m. the parkway is humming, or anyhow before 5:30, then a helicopter, muted music audible in darkness. For now, only the breath, the body lying awake, easing into semblance of action, waiting for bell or impulse calling her to rise. Hours later, with a shock of sunlight, robins will come to feast on beadlike purple beautyberries thick on weeping boughs below her breakfast window, banquet grown from a single twig stuck in the ground and watered to root seven years before, or six or eight. Her coffee is cold. She resists. How to start the morning? Read from a book of nightmares, hallucinations in the waking world? Listen to the news? Or stand outside and look up, at leaf skeletons shivering high in the tallest trees, farther, through thin clouds, white and gray and slowly passing, into the pearling sky? Birds are calling, invisible, then visible, in ones and twos and a murmuration. She anticipates geese that never show. Branches against the sky aren’t lacy. Lace is the imitation, of branches, leaves, trees. When sunlight hits she remembers, recalled to the day, its tasks, its calendar and expectations. The world she’s fallen behind, the self she can’t keep up with, the silence she has no words to write.
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Night Deer
Erin Keane
Arriving home through the airport at night, metal gates pulled down over the shops and restaurants, we few late-flight stragglers make no eye contact. Head down, carry-on in tow, I wind my way to the surface lot, the December near-midnight piercing my lungs. The whoosh of the expressway behind me as I dig out the scraper and brush the inch of snow off the windshield toward the silent runways ahead. I left my husband and dog two days ago in the pre-dawn and am coming in past bedtime. Truth is, I no longer mind being alone as I deliver myself out of hotel life and slip back into home: on the train, in the air, on the quiet roads, I become someone unknowable in transit, neither one self nor the other, obligated only to me. In my neighborhood’s tiny yards, inflatable holiday mascots lay facedown and flat in the off-white dusting. I think of the David Berman poem, the one with the little brother and the snow angels and the shotgun massacre. (Did I make that up, the shotgun?) I turn onto our dead-end alley toward my garage, tires crunching gravel, thinking only of bed and its transformational power, and here, blocking my way, a doe, legs folded under her trembling heft, blinking in the headlight glow. I roll the window down and let in the cold. Hey girl, I stage-whisper, aware of the silence, her sentry ears on high alert, the others surely sleeping in the neighbor’s unfenced garden. Can I squeeze by? We lock eyes. The nearby park is her home, but she is the same deer in the park as in out. Her body, to us, obstacle and gift. She unwraps herself onto steady feet and brushes past my open window, clearing a path. I realize I’m holding my breath. Above us, Orion’s belt, flanked by winking satellites.
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If You Were Here,
Kleopatra Olympiou
I’d play the piano for you, anything you like, even songs I don’t love I learned for piano exams, songs you had to hear me stumble over again and again, I’d play you all those songs we coexisted to before, run my fingers through those old shapes of us, and we’d open the shutters and let the light pour in, and we’d water the plants, pretend their dried remains are still alive, and you’d tell me not to treat the living room like a storage facility, and you’d ask me what I did with all your things (your diplomas; your souvenirs from France; the vase grandma passed down to you), and I’d put away my suitcases and maybe not live abroad anymore, and I’d call this ‘home’ again and not ‘my mother’s house,’ and we’d wash the veranda tiles until they emerged white again from underneath all these layers and years of dirt, and I’d slice us both some apples to have on the plastic chairs by the bougainvillea, like you always cut up fruit for me to eat while I did my homework, except the piano is all out of tune, and I’m only retracing my steps in this kingdom of dust.
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Hearthline
Lleyton Michael Kane
My neighbor lights her stove early, before the sky decides on a color. She burns alder, always alder, because it crackles in a way that reminds her of a place she won’t name. I hear it through the wall—the soft arranging of kindling, the scrape of match on box, the long exhale as the flame finds the threshold between trying and taking. On solstice morning she opens her window for a moment, letting out a brief coil of woodsmoke that drifts into the courtyard like a ribbon dropped from a holiday parade. A cat noses it, puzzled. The smoke curls, lifts, disappears. I sip my coffee, lean down to the rim, and watch the steam join the alder. Two small proofs: that warmth is something we make, and that even in the shortest light, it wants to rise.
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Shelter on the Plain Outside San Angelo
Warren Stoddard II
Have you heard of the coming of winter? From the panhandle the winds bear down over the plains and settle in a copse of trees nestled between a wide field and the edge of a river no one among the crowd has ever heard the name of. There are fourteen whitetail in the copse. A doe watches an itinerant family of pronghorn move across the field. She smells them. She smells the wind and the grey sky that mills above in a kind of turbulence. A fawn lies beside her, curled tight into the crook of her belly, white spots on its back showing like the moon has repatriated itself again and again along the spine of the calf.
Across the crowd, the mess of gnarled and interlocking brown bodies, a buck’s head rises. It is late in the day. His eyes twitch. The pronghorn disappear into another thicket of oak. The buck’s nose moves. Sunlight—one small and lonesome shaft—pierces the cloud cover, but only for an instant. It flashes bright and auburn and the buck feels its warmth on him. Then it is gone and the chill returns and xylophones along his ribs. There is a strange smell in the air. He follows it. He listens too. He hears a slow creaking as nearly imperceptible as the noise of melting ice. The smell he cannot place. The buck turns his head to the sky, as if looking for answers on the wind or inscribed along the underbellies of the clouds. The silhouetted wings of ducks pass above, many-numbered and determined in their formation.
One flurry begins the season, and it drifts down softly, as rose petals fall into water. The snow settles on the deer and touches their backs like the tips of lances. They start and look to the sky. Fourteen of them. They listen to the wind. Snowflakes rest on their noses, the points of their antlers. Something moves through them, and they listen intently to the sound of the forest, the movement of the plain, the flow of the river, the silent tumult of the sky.
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Author Bios
Mizuki Yamamoto is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Mizuki’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming at SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, HAD, The Forge Literary, hex, Lost Balloon, Does It Have Pockets and other places. She was the winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025 and was shortlisted for the 31st Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best MicroFiction. Find her online on BlueSky or at mizukiwrites.carrd.co
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Catherine Reedy is an Instructor of English and the Chair of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Lake Forest College. Her fiction has been published in American Literary Review, decomp magazine, and Crack the Spine; her academic research has been published in Early Modern Literary Studies and in the essay collections Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State University Press) and Historicizing the Embodied Imagination (Palgrave). Her flash fiction “Growth” recently won the October Flash Flood at American Literary Review. She is at work on a novel based on the Duchess of Amalfi and a monograph on the plague in Shakespeare’s theater.
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Kendra Cardin creates a safe harbor for herself with poetry and storytelling. Her writings have found homes in a variety of publications including those of Rough Diamond Poetry, Five Minutes, Blink-Ink, Temple in a City, Neither Fish Nor Foul, and Cowboy Jamboree.
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Gareth E. Rees is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. His books include Sunken Lands (Elliott & Thompson 2024), Terminal Zones (Influx Press 2022), Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020), Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019) and The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018). His first book, Marshland was reissued in 2024 by Influx Press in a new expanded edition.
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Catherine Gammon is author of the story collection The Gunman and the Carnival (2024) and the novels The Martyrs, The Lovers (2023), China Blue (2021), Sorrow (2013) and Isabel Out of the Rain (1991). Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, and Iowa Review, among many others. More at www.catherinegammon.com and on Substack @nonabiding.
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Erin Keane is the author of the memoir RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, one of NPR’s best books of 2022, and Demolition of the Promised Land, a collection of poems inspired by Bruce Springsteen, among other works. She is chief content officer at Salon.com and teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.
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Kleopatra Olympiou is a writer from Cyprus. Her stories have been published in swamp pink, Tiny Molecules, and Flash Flood, among other journals. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction and nominated for the 2026 Best of the Net. She currently lives in London. Find her at kleopatraolympiou.com.
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Lleyton Michael Kane is in the 12th grade at Mount de Sales Academy in Macon, Georgia. His short story, “Staring Beyond Kings and Gods” was awarded second place in the 2024, 11th Grade Division of the GISA State Creative Writing competition. His poetry has appeared in Howl Magazine (2025). Most recently, his poem “The Right to Possible” was awarded 1st Prize in the 2025 Renee Duke Youth Poetry Award competition announced at the Human Rights Awards Event in Austin, TX on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025, in celebration of the 77th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Kane is an autistic writer with a keen sense of restraint and aesthetic empathy. He lives with his family in Georgia in a house filled with paintings, dogs, and stories that unfold slowly.
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Warren Stoddard II’s short work has been published in Terrain, Into the Void, The Barely South Review and many other magazines and journals. His work was named as Notable Literary Nonfiction in The Best American Essays: 2021, was the winner of the 2018 Gates Thomas Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation’s 2025 Short Story Prize, won the Prebys Poetry and Creative Writing Award, and he received the Presidential Graduate Research Fellowship at San Diego State University, where he is currently a student in the MFA program.