“Tonight, We Embrace the Dark” • by Gideon P. Smith

We hated the off-season.

Cold, pickled fish, salted meats, hardtack. Fumbling in a year-long frigid night. Fearing what lurked in the dark.

Until, like a drop of viscid honey, our planet’s Sun slowly rotated into view. At on-season’s dawn, we threw aside furs. Iridescent flower’s perfumes exploded. Seed pods popped and sweet, pungent fruits hung from every tree. Fresh juices spilling from our lips, we danced. Leapt. Made love. We swam naked, treasuring on-season’s warming rays. 

But then, foreigners arrived, bringing gifts: generators; batteries. Everything changed.

At first, we marveled at our new off-season. Refrigerated foods, warmth, light. But when on-season dawned, the joy of first-light was gone. Our parties felt forced. Off-season had become just on-season’s paler sister. Life was monotonous. Our children softened.

We’d lost off-season’s beauty. Fierce, harsh, and strong. It’d made us who we were. So tonight, we destroy the generators. Reclaim nature’s rhythm.

Tonight, we re-embrace the dark.

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Gideon P. Smith has written for SFWA, BSFA Focus Magazine, Wyldblood Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, Troopers Quarterly, and anthologies from Black Hare Press, Shacklebound, and Fairfield Scribes. He was a 2023 NESFA short story competition and 2024 Writers of the Future finalist, and is a first reader for Diabolical Plots and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores. A first-generation college graduate, Gideon emigrated from Scotland to New England, where he enjoys hiking the White Mountains with his sons.

For more information, visit Gideon’s blog at https://gideonpsmith.com/

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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than 150 words in length that played off the phrase: “the off season.”