It’s definitely winter. It is, unusually, less winter at the moment here than it is on pretty much the entire east coast of North America, but even here it’s winter enough to make one think of warmer times and places.
This coincides with a little story I ran out in response to a prompt which appeared last week on the Facebook Group which CBC Books keeps to support their Canada Writes program. Let me show it to you:

Now, Canada Writes is aimed primarily at literary fiction, which is not what I do. There are those who argue that any fiction is necessarily speculative, otherwise it’s stuff that happened and thus not fiction, but I bow to the common separation of literary from genre. However, this doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally drop my kind of stuff on the table there, when I don’t think it will cause too much upset.
I was pleased enough with the effect that blatting something directly onto Facebook produced that I’ve decided to polish it a very little and present it here as On a Beach.