Points of light, day 4

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 Rachel M. Hollis, Bethany Bruno, Gabriella Navas, Caroline Clark, Vaughn M. Watson, Elodie Ashcroft, Gideon Leek, Kathryn Reese, Emil DeAndreis, Michael Hyde, and J.M.C. Kane

The Longest Night

Rachel M. Hollis

My brother and I used to breathe heavy, hot air against the car windows on our long trips to our aunt’s house for Christmas. The condensation bloomed instantly, giving us a canvas for crooked hearts and snowflakes and smiley faces traced with warm fingers. The backroads wound through a thin dusting of snow, barely visible in the dark, but we didn’t care. We were focused only on the inside. The hush of the heater, the radio turned low, Dad’s gentle snore from the front seat. Each time our drawings disappeared, fading back into clear glass, we leaned forward and breathed again, reviving them against the cold.

Leaning Close to the Light

Bethany Bruno

Every December my family brings out the mannequin and dresses it in Uncle Ray’s flannel, boots, and watch, a winter ritual that began as a joke and softened into something we never named after he died. Tonight, the candles burn low on the dining table, their light thin as breath, and when everyone drifts to the living room I stay behind in the hush, facing the figure we’ve filled with his things. The coat still carries a trace of cedar and cigarette smoke. The watch on its wrist ticks with a borrowed steadiness, the kind that makes you listen harder in the dark.

In the wavering glow the shape loses its plastic edges and holds, for a moment, the suggestion of him—nothing dramatic, only the familiar weight of presence returning the way warmth sometimes returns to your hands when you aren’t expecting it. I rest my palm on the cold sleeve, and the quiet gathers around us like soft snowfall, a fleeting certainty that even in the longest night, something once loved can still lean close enough to light the room.

Lejos de Aquí

Gabriella Navas

Gloria studied Héctor’s wela and tried to picture her at their age, back in Puerto Rico, sweating at some dimly lit party in the caseríos, breaking night with other young adults who had yet to understand that someday they would no longer move as one body but as a body being slowly cannibalized by itself in the name of survival. She pictured Héctor’s wela making love with—no, fucking—an older boy who would someday be dead, who was already dead and just didn’t know it yet. Héctor’s wela, who escaped one mouth just to find herself in another, lodged in its back molar, still waiting to be picked out and swallowed, even all these years later. Héctor’s wela, who cooked and cooked and cooked just to make sure everyone stayed fed, so they would never have to know what hunger felt like, what it could do to a person if they let it, if they became hungry for the wrong things. Gloria cleared her throat and turned away.

Year’s End

Caroline Clark

Each year it will be slightly different, though, as you remember it later, always the same. Fire crackle. Each year you will long for the silence of snowfall. Elder and sloe. To go up on the hill and walk through the woods and return having felt the change. Darkening by four o’clock. You won’t know when it’s going to happen. Blackbird’s warning cry. The pivot will have turned irreversibly. Old man’s beard. And the only way to tread will be onwards. Teasel spikes and ivy. There is never any backwards tack in these parts. Leaves underfoot. Know the direction is ahead and you’d better get going. Robin’s liquid notes. You’ll be given a moment to look both ways and remember what came before. Rabbits scurry. Whatever there was is lost, though you don’t want to know it yet. Reddening skies. You can almost touch it still. Dried yarrow, wild carrot. Look, as it acquires past time, glowing there behind you. Pitch black. There’s a buzzing inside, a bell being rung, a bright self trying to become.

resurfacing

Vaughn M. Watson

cobblestone rests beneath a torn-up chunk of 145th Street. the cartoonish bouncing of a delivery truck traversing a broken road. what would it take to resurface a Haarlem where the calls of prey once beckoned the Wecquaesgeek? where Jews in horse-drawn carriages shored up futures in an uptown ghetto? rows of cones, circles of floodlights. nights of churning asphalt, and the incessant beeping of agitators. resurfacing will surely take more time than previously anticipated. a coffee shop further downhill foreshadows an area once again in upheaval. one muggy afternoon, the potholes were filled, hastily and saliently. a crosstown bus screeches to a halt and exhales. deliverymen speed downhill in defiant bliss. the street has been successfully resurfaced, yes, but it feels no different to my sneakered feet.

Revolution

Elodie Ashcroft

We are constantly reborn throughout our lives. I’m as new at being forty as I was at being twenty. Someday I’ll circle back to that burbling freedom that sings like air pouring off a glacier in springtime, and someday I’ll feel that suffering of sitting in a library, gulping down the silence, my pain for family pouring out to stain the faces of friends found only yesterday. But for now, we lay in bed beneath an open umbrella, and I sing to you.

Stay in Bed

Gideon Leek

On a cold day, you can sleep forever. Listen to the hum of the radiator, the sigh of falling snow. Let the cool breeze from your single-pane window wipe the heat from your forehead. Remember that it’s perfect, under a blanket, completely warm. It’s like you are the small god of a hopeful comet—entirely safe, going somewhere, outer space endless on all sides. Why would you wake up, really? To shiver into cold clothes? To shovel another foot of snow? To freeze waiting for a train? You’d have to be crazy to crash your little comet into that black hole of black ice and black coffee. Better stay safe. Better sleep. Forever, if you can.

Transportable

Kathryn Reese

Make it all up: the sunrise, the mist, the way butter melts over hot toast. The myth of honey, the way it turns to a crystal slurry when it’s cold, and sticks to your spoon. Make up a house on a hill: not bricks but a box with thin walls and no foundation, the windows wet. The condensation of our breath and the steam from the kettle. Make up that I drink tea with no milk and my fingers cradle the mug just so. Outside the song of magpies or blackbirds or the wars of lorikeets in the peach tree call us to a world beyond ourselves—but I insist on eggs poached in a drop of vinegar and on waiting, my hip against the kitchen bench, for so many bubbles to break the still water. You talk of moving on from this holiday shack we call home. There’s no heat held by the thin-skin walls stapled to crumbling termite-holed bones. I say wait. One more week. Stay, baby. Let’s stay.

Disturbance

Emil DeAndreis

The ride across was choppy and salt waves crashed into our kayak. We built a fire with a long tree limb that warmed our food and dried our clothes. After the wood burned through, the fire died and the coastal fog settled on us thick and wet. You would say like a dog’s nose, and I would say yes, like that.

Deep in the night, well past your bedtime, we took the kayaks out. Our minds can’t really make sense of how dark the world gets, how much of it lives in this dark. Where our oars gulped the water, we saw blossoms of neon. Microscopic organisms, their chemicals reacting to our disturbance. Out on the black water, bright contours of stingrays appeared, gliding beneath us like maestros leading adagios, and then they flickered out.

The man steering our kayak, I’d never met before. He had a snaggletooth, had drank scotch and told stories of himself all night and was now paddling us further down shore. He beached us, and his footfalls in wet sand got faint as he slipped out of sight. Tents of another sleeping campsite zipped open. Flashlights found him caught in a barbed wire fence, bloodied and laughing, clutching a pile of their firewood.

Back at our campsite, he built a new fire and circled its blaze like a proud father. Twice he fell into it, then finally rolled over into sleep. I thought about finding you, eyebrows pinched over a coloring book in crystal morning, telling you of the glow I’d seen. I wondered where the ray was then, if it was somewhere near casting its miracle to no one.

Night Yard

Michael Hyde

Tonight, the seams between worlds loosen themselves. Darkness peers into light, light into dark. All things with toes and feet begin to creep.

Red curry warms in the pot on the stove, bright smells. I’m alone yet not lonely, though I’m thinking of you and surrounded by winter.

I taste, I rinse the spoon.

Motion detected: the night yard beyond the kitchen window floods with light.

A doe lifts her head, chewing the remains of summer hostas.

Her tail flips, her ears fluttering like wings at the sides of her head. She and I have estimated each other before.

The winter chill turns to welcome.

An invitation slides under the crack in the front door.

What it’s like to feel wonder. At this age, still.

The Bus Shelter on Archer

J.M.C. Kane

By the time I reach the bus shelter on Archer, the wind has scraped the block down to its bare noises—paper skittering, a loose sign tapping against its bracket, the faint metallic throat of the elevated tracks. A man is already sitting inside the shelter, hunched forward, elbows on his knees, breath rising in short, visible bursts. I step in, shake the cold from my hands, and he glances at me, quick and guarded, as if expecting trouble. I’m not trouble, but I look away too fast, which sometimes amounts to the same thing. The bus tracker says twelve minutes. We wait in a silence that feels like it belongs more to the weather than to either of us. When the wind pushes a drift of grit under the shelter’s roof, the man lifts his boot slightly, making room—an unnecessary courtesy, offered without looking up. I nod, though he may not see it. The bus groans into view, headlights smeared by the cold fog on the glass. As I climb aboard, I turn back and catch his eye just once; he holds it long enough to register me, then lets it go. The door folds shut and the shelter takes him back, a small lit box in the dark, waiting for the next body to share its thin warmth. The timetable ticks over. The night goes on wintering.

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Rachel M. Hollis lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, child, and a deeply unmotivated dog. Her work appears or is forthcoming in River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Gone Lawn, Funicular, Sky Island Journal, Blink-Ink and elsewhere.

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. Born in Hollywood and raised in Port St. Lucie, she holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than ninety literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, McSweeney’s, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Brevity, and The Huffington Post. A Best of the Net nominee, she won 2025 flash fiction contests from Inscape Journal and Blue Earth Review. She is the winner of the 2026 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.

Gabriella Navas is a Puerto Rican writer hailing from Jersey City, NJ. Her work has previously appeared in [PANK], Storm Cellar, Fractured Lit, Quarterly West, The Masters Review, and Sequestrum. She is easily distracted, frequently smitten, and always willing to talk about the healing powers of Chavela Vargas’s discography. She currently lives in Columbus, OH, where she is working on her first novel. You can find more of her words @gee.navas on Instagram.

Caroline Clark’s books are: Saying Yes In Russian, Agenda Editions; Sovetica and Own Sweet Time both with CB editions. She has recent work and a podcast interview on the Fictionable site. In 2026 Black Herald Press will publish her next book: What Lies Ahead and Other Essays.

Vaughn M. Watson is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer based in New York City. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in literary journals as varied as Tahoma Literary Review, About Place Journal, and The Common. His debut poetry collection, going out & being normal, was named Runner-Up for the 2025 Press 53 Award for Poetry.

Elodie Ashcroft is a teacher of French and English and a writer of poems, stories, and novels-in-progress. She has recently published the short story Katabasis in Blood+Honey. When she’s not reading for work or fun, she takes a hike.

Gideon Leek has stories published or forthcoming in Hobart, Expat, Animal Blood Magazine, and the Oxford Review of Books. He was a finalist for the 2025 Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Fiction from The Cincinnati Review. He lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a novel.

Kathryn Reese is a queer writer living on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical science and enjoys road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems are in The Engine Idling, Temple in a City, Crowstep and Red Room Poetry. Flash in Glassworks, Blood +Honey & Literary Namjooning. Collaborative writing in Gone Lawn, Midway Journal & Spark 2 Flame.

Emil DeAndreis has three books, as well as short fiction in Michigan Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, DIAGRAM, and more. His recent novel Tell Us When To Go was described as “impossible to put down and heartbreaking in all the right places” by Junot Diaz, and the SF Chronicle said it “blossoms with genuine heart and pathos.” It was a finalist for SF Public Library’s One City One Book in 2024.

Michael Hyde is the author of What Are You Afraid Of?, a book of stories, and his short fiction has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Jabberwock Review, and Philadelphia Stories, among others. He lives in South Orange, NJ.

J.M.C. Kane writes with surgical precision about loss, language, and the systems we build to make sense of collapse. His work trusts readers to feel what isn’t said, finding devastation in the space between observation and explanation. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk U.K.), a celebrated nonfiction work on cognitive patterning and inclusion in the workplace.