Today with family ill is less merry than usual, so let’s dive into Beth Gilstrap’s fantastically dark “That Christmas I Ate Moonshine Cherries and Became a Fortune Teller,” published at https://stonecirclereview.com/that-christmas/.

For the first prompt, write a poem or story about Christmas with family and the secrets and truths stuffed in pies, the meat and bones of conversations and silences, the throat and the belly of a family.

The second prompt is to write what you carry in “pockets and call them signs” or what you carry to ward off disaster and inevitability and family history.

For the third, write a poem or story using the following list of words: “bunting,” “borderline,” “bold,” “shells,” “roiling,” “bathwater,” “foothills,” “roof,“ “synthetic,” “choked,” “manufactured,” “wrong,” and “signs.”

My mother, as the youngest in her family, was the first to use the bath, the water pumped and carried from the yard, and heated on the stove in winter or by the sun in summer. She now uses a washcloth once and reuses a bath towel just once, the water hers alone. She can always buy more milk if she spills it; she isn’t made to cry over its loss. Write about what necessities or deprivations you have left behind.

Bonus prompt: write about the world on this globe-enclosed ship, on seas ever still, ever far from land.