Lisa Short’s story “The Season of Withering” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 18 October 2019. 
I have the (probably peculiar) lifelong habit of making up bedtime stories and telling them to myself when I’m having trouble getting to sleep at night. A lot of the stories I end up writing have this exercise as their inspirational mechanism, and this particular one definitely originated as a “bedtime story.” I didn’t get much past the opening scene (I usually don’t, because I fall asleep at that point!) but that scene, and the four main actors in it, were so vividly realized that I really couldn’t wait to explore how they had all gotten there, why that scene was unfolding the way it was, and what was going to happen to them next.
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