From down here, you can’t see jack-shit.

You see, the nice thing about being perched in a watchtower fifty feet up in the air was that we could see the wide, open world of trees and mountain peaks that surrounded the village of Pinehaven. As its protectors, that was kind of important. But now that the tower is gone, we’re confined to a pathetic little hut no bigger than a shed and settled on the ground. It feels like we’re all living in a sardine can, and the snowstorms coming from the mountain are like big shoes kicking us around.

The sounds of construction were giving me a headache. I was plagued by constant fears that the portable outhouse we all shared would tip over with a gust of wind. But worst of all? It was a week after Christmas and Daniel was still singing carols.

Hey. This is Operator Evelyn, code-name #28 from the Pinehaven Emergency Broadcast Station. This is a busy time for us, but I wanted to take a few minutes to tell the story of how New Year’s Eve went absolutely fucking bananas.

​

It began the way a lot of things do around here, early in the morning when I arrived at work with a big yawn and an even bigger travel mug of too-strong coffee. I traded places with Finn, who gave me a crisp high-five on his way out the door. I’ve been trying to get him to move on to finger-guns, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet. While he was heading back to the old homestead to get some well-deserved sleep, I was making sure our morning music line-up was set for the next hour. Finn had it perfectly organized down to the second, as per usual, pre-recorded ads already slid into place. He had even cleaned all the discount post-Christmas candy wrappers off of my side of the desk.

I spent the next few hours settling in, giving the morning weather forecast, and practicing saying “Happy New Year” in sign language.

I should have known it was about to be a weird day as soon as I saw the sunrise come up over the horizon. It was more purple than usual. The rich color of the sky remained late into the morning, surrounded by long, tendril-shaped flares like a second sun. What do they call it? Uncanny valley, I think: when something is just ‘off’ enough to catch your attention, but not so strange that it looks impossible. I regarded the sunrise with a squint of suspicion, waiting for it to fade into the bright blue winter sky. It did, in time.

And then, at ten o’clock in the morning, the door came bursting open and a cold wind rattled the thin, plywood walls. It was my worst nightmare in human form, here to haunt me yet again.

“Feliz año nuevo, ya’ little creep.” Daniel said energetically, pushing the door closed with his shoulder. He was still on crutches, his broken leg in a big white cast. It was covered in little sharpie drawings, most of them from me. It looked like his siblings added a few during the Esperanza Christmas party this year. My personal favorite was a doodle of Bartholemew the bird holding a knife.

I raised my eyebrows at him over the lid of my coffee cup. “I don’t speak French,” I teased. Dan hopped over to the desk and flopped into his usual chair, leaning his crutches up against the edge of the table.

“Okay, smartass.” He kicked my chair with his good leg, causing me to roll a few inches to the side. “I take it back, then. I hope you have a terrible New Year. I hope you eat a whole bag of dicks.”

“Oh, delicious, my favorite.” I rolled back into place again, curling one leg underneath me and getting comfortable. “Happy New Year to you too. So how’d you sleep last night, Danny Boy?”

He was fixing his curls, which had been tossed around in the high winds. He picked up a clipboard and spun slowly on his wheels, reading over the day’s notes. We had a raffle going on that he was extremely excited about. “I slept great,” he said, pointing to his chin. What at first looked like a scab from a bad shave turned out to be rug burn instead. “The nice thing about sleepwalking with a broken leg? You don’t get far.”

I cringed, squinting my one eye to look at the nasty mark. “Oooh, ouch. Better than getting lost in the woods though, right? Or jumping into mysterious holes.”

“It was one singular mysterious hole and I did not jump, I attempted a graceful swan dive before you interrupted.”

“Yeah, okay.” I snorted, getting out of my seat. I turned to the little coffee maker we had plugged in behind the desk, filled with distilled water from jugs. It was sitting on a rickety old chair we found in the shed. “Sincere apologies, connoisseur of strange holes. I didn’t mean to offend. Do you want some coffee while I’m back here?”

Dan threw a crumpled up piece of paper at the back of my head. He was in rare form today. “No thanks, darlin’, I’m good. I’m off my tits on Monster Energy.” I heard the distinct pop of a can top.

I snickered, tossing the paper wad in the trash. “That explains everything. While you get settled in, wanna do the raffle announcement? After Come Fly With Me? I didn’t pre-record it because I thought you’d wanna do the honors.”

“Oh, you do love me.” Dan gave a huge, gap-toothed grin while he adjusted his hearing aid, making sure it was secure before putting his headphones overtop. As I pretended to gag at his cutesy bullshit, he started to loudly sing along with the radio, just as I feared he would.

Our new set-up sucks enormous hairy ass, if I’m being completely honest. It was built in an afternoon out of plywood and spare pieces from an old barn, each plank a different shade of peeling paint. There’s no plumbing, no heat, and if you want to keep something refrigerated, you just stick it in the snow by the door. The plexiglass window out front isn’t much of a lookout, either. All we can see is snow and the treeline, which is far darker and more foreboding from this angle than it ever was up in the air. We’re packed into a space just barely large enough for all of our equipment. The old tower wasn’t very big, sure, but at least Daniel and I could sit side-by-side without constantly assaulting one another with our elbows.

As I refilled my travel mug, I could hear my co-host crooning into his microphone.

“It’s ten o’clock on a beautiful Saturday morning, and my partner and I just want to wish everyone down in Pinehaven a fantastic New Year’s Eve. For tonight and tonight only, we’ll be giving away a special prize to one lucky winner. To enter the raffle, call and tell us your New Year’s Resolution and we’ll draw a name at midnight for a fifty-dollar gift card to The Pottery Barn!”

I stifled a snort of laughter. Pinehaven was still rebuilding after the disaster that happened before Christmas, but there was something so pathetically hopeful about offering compensation in the form of fifty dollars worth of pottery. I briefly wondered what would happen if no one called us, but I didn’t say anything. It would break Dan’s squishy little heart.

As it turned out, we actually did get some calls.

Bill from Chestnut Avenue wants to eat less red meat. Kendall wants to call her sister more often. Emily says she’d go to a gym if Pinehaven had a gym, but she’ll settle with long walks in the evening. Travis said he wants to start sleeping better at night. Patricia wants to sleep better at night. Jamal wants to sleep better at night. Paige wants to sleep better at night. Anthony wants to sleep better at night.

By mid-afternoon, the sky was already starting to grow dark. We could hear the distinct caw of several dozen crows, perched at the treeline where the forest met the clearing. We could hear the rumble of something that sounded like thunder, but we knew it probably wasn’t.

All at once, the wind stopped. The trees were completely still, the wispy dark clouds in the sky were as still as a picture. Everything got eerily, horribly silent. I stood at the window, my breath making a warm fog on the plexiglass surface.

“So…what about you?” I heard Dan ask from behind me. “What’s your resolution this year?”

I thought about it in silence for a moment. I wanted to stop drinking entirely. Maybe try therapy. I wanted a will to live, not just for Pinehaven, but because I was happy. I wanted to figure out what made me happy. I wanted to dance. I wanted to say “I love you” more often to the people who mattered to me.

“To start drinking more water,” I lied. “What about you?”

Daniel was silent for a minute before he, too, had an answer. “Maybe I’ll write a book.”

My lip twitched in the tiniest of smiles while I watched the crows gather on the radio tower. The blinking red light at the top was dancing against a pure black sky while the clock on the wall ticked loudly. “I think that’s a great idea, Danny Boy.”

​

It was late by the time Finn showed up, agreeing to take over for Dan and I.

“What’s with all the fucking crows?” He asked the moment he stepped inside, slamming the door behind him. The thin walls shuddered and the whole place shook. “They’re in town too, thousands of ‘em probably.”

“Maybe it’s an omen.” Daniel said, wiggling his fingers. “Also, Happy New Year, Finn. Got any resolutions?”

“Yeah, to get all the bird shit off my car.” He sighed and sat down, all three of our chairs packed in tightly side-by-side. He looked tired, dark circles under his eyes and his hair more gray than usual. Sometimes I suspected that Daniel and I were the cause for that, honestly. “So what have I missed?”

I sat back in my seat, tapping my pen against the edge of the desk. “Lots of calls. Daniel’s been a popular boy tonight with his little raffle idea. We heard thunder earlier.”

“It wasn’t thunder.” Finn shook his head. “There’s another big sinkhole at the edge of town. You know where the old Christmas tree farm was?”

I narrowed my eye. “...Was?”

“Yeah. It’s in a hole,” Finn continued, lighting up a cigarette and shoving the rest of the box in the front pocket of his coat. “Looks like a giant ditch now, going straight down into the abandoned mine shaft. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Phil’s truck was gone, place was all locked up. He must’a left before Christmas.”

“Damn…” I frowned, warming my hands by sticking them back inside the sleeves of my jacket. “I really liked that place when I was a kid, too. My dad always let me take the first swing.”

The thought of those mines opening up outside of the town, so close to the road, sent a chill up my spine. I think everyone else felt it too. I remembered the horrible, melted screams of that amalgamate beast, its many human torsos all crawling over one another like a centipede, its hooves stampeding through the trees. I remembered the way it could crack the pines in half. The Hydra…it was still out there somewhere, missing pieces but as angry as ever. Sometimes, I still saw the earth shift at the treeline.

“It’s quiet in here.” Finn said after a long silence, breathing out a puff of smoke that made the view of our computer monitors hazy. “...Did the clock stop working?”

Sure enough, we all looked up at the wall and saw that the circular clock had paused. It was just a few minutes to midnight, the minute hand stuck on the number 11 and twitching in place. The clocks on our monitors read the same.

“Do you guys see that?”

I was staring out the window, slowly standing up and pushing my chair away. As I stepped towards the plexiglass, which was now beginning to fog up from the body heat stuffed inside this tiny room, I saw that purple light again. This wasn’t the light from the forest, the one glowing from within a giant hole in the ground. This one floated above the trees and into the sky, flares of light popping and wiggling around it. The second sun.

It grew brighter, large, perhaps closer. I heard a great and powerful drone, loud enough to make my ears hurt. Daniel took out his hearing aid, the tiny device squealing into the open air as he dropped it on the desk.

All at once, we heard a rapid ticking. The clock was moving again, racing as if trying to catch up. Our monitors began to blink, the time on the screen flickered and began to count upwards. 11:59, 11:60, 11:61 - minutes that didn’t even exist. There was a loud screech from all three of our headsets, volume blaring and seemingly coming from all directions at once.

We’ll drink a cup…

The floor began to shake beneath our feet. The lights flickered on and off, changing colors from red to orange to purple.

Of kindness yet…

Crows were flying at the window, hitting the plexiglass. The glittering stars flew overhead as if the hours were speeding by. The purple glow now drifting closer grew so bright that it took up the entire view.

For the sake of auld lang syne.

Everything in the room shut off with a loud buzz: the lights, the computer monitors, the audio console. I heard nothing except our own panicked breathing and the sound of my pulse inside my ears. Finally, there it was again - the clock on the wall began to tick. It was five minutes to midnight again.

Daniel was the first one to speak. “Okay, Jesus, what the fuck was that?”

I tapped the keyboard of my computer, testing to see if the screen would come back on. Nothing happened. “I don’t know, but I think we lost power. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I’m gonna go get the generator started.”

I drew my coat closer around my neck, the night’s chill sinking in. As I took two small steps toward the door, I reached for the handle and prepared to run out without even looking where I was going. I would be shocked to find that instead of hitting the snowy ground, my boot sank through the air with a plunge that made my heart drop all the way down to my knees.

In an instant, I was dangling, holding onto the door handle for dear life. I felt the wind blowing against my legs, the cold air whistling in my ear. I was looking up at the open doorway where Finn was already rushing to the edge to grab my arms. The old, worn hinges of the door were starting to protest against my weight.

“Evelyn, let go!” Finn yelled, gripping my arms right below the elbows.

“Uh, no?!” I yelped, my voice coming out as a panicked squeak. “Fuck you?!”

“Trust me, let go or you and the door are gonna drop!”

I looked down. I really shouldn’t have looked down. We were floating at least a half-mile above the forest, dirt and roots dangling from the bottom of the shed as if it had been plucked off the ground. Below us, that magenta light coming from that endless pit was shining brightly like a round burst of color - an eye looking up into the stars.

I was hyperventilating. My head was starting to spin, the world turning on its side as I grew dizzy and faint. When I looked back up at the door, Finn wasn’t there anymore. Someone else had taken his place. I saw a thick red beard, tan freckled skin, a yellow and orange fireman’s coat. He was holding my elbows tightly, nodding his head with a comforting, reassuring smile.

“I got you, gingersnap.” He said. “But you gotta let go…”

“I-I’m gonna fall!” The voice that came out of my mouth wasn’t mine. It was tiny, young, childlike.

“You ain’t gonna fall, darlin’. Trust your pa, I’ve got you.”

I braced myself, teeth clenched. Before I could have a chance to doubt my decision, my hand released the doorknob and I felt my weight shift suddenly and startlingly. My eye squeezed shut as I was pulled upwards, my stomach hitting the edge of the doorway first before the rest of me toppled onto something warm and human-shaped.

He didn’t smell like dad anymore, he smelled like cigarette smoke and pine. Finn gave me a pat on the back, pushing me by the shoulders to ease me off of him so that he could stand.

​

I clutched my chest, sitting in the middle of the floor and struggling to breathe. Daniel was out of his chair at this point, sitting on his ass halfway to the door as if he had either fallen or tried to scoot instead of using his crutches. “I think I’m having a panic attack.” He wheezed.

“You’re always having a panic attack.” Finn grabbed Daniel under the arms, pulling him up and putting a crutch under his arm so that he could stand. “Lyn, you okay?”

I looked up at him, my sight still bleary, head still spinning. I blinked and felt a tear rolling down my cheek. “Y-yeah, I’m okay.” I sniffed as Finn grabbed my hand and pulled me up, patting my shoulders. “So, um…Don’t go out that door, okay, fellas?”

I forced a small chuckle. All three of us were looking out the window now, watching the wind push us along as we floated far above the trees and just under the clouds. The wooden boards were creaking and whining like a boat being rocked by the waves.

The dingy, hanging light above us started to buzz. The bulb crackled back to life, our computer screens flickered, the radio static was blasting in our headsets. We heard the music again.

​

Should auld acquaintance be forgot…

A warm red light filled the sky, thunder roaring as meteors began to fall from the heavens. They made the sound of whistling fireworks as they fell. We all braced ourselves while the shed began to rock, flames engulfing the trees.

And never brought to mind?

The ticking was louder now. 11:62…11:63…

We were falling. The building gave one violent roll to the side like an aircraft going out of control, and suddenly we could see the flaming trees below getting closer and closer. The three of us fell into a pile on the floor. Finn was grabbing the edge of the desk for dear life. Daniel was squeezing me so hard that it hurt.

11:63…11:64.

​

The impact never came. It was as if I blinked and everything was normal again. I was standing there, looking out the window at the banks of snow and the treeline up ahead. I could see the clock on the wall, frozen at 11:50 out of the corner of my eye. I could see the computer screens glowing bright from the corner of…my other eye?

“Okay, now I’m actually having a panic attack.” I heard my voice, but I wasn’t the one to say it. I turned on a dime, and saw a short, red-headed figure in a ratty old denim jacket standing behind me. She clapped her hands over her mouth, then looked at her own freckled fingers and let out a shriek. How the fuck was I standing in two places at once?

“Who the fuck are you?!” I yelled, pointing a finger. It wasn’t my voice that came out of my mouth. It wasn’t my hand that was reaching.

“Dan! I think?” The Evelyn imposter said, holding up her hands. She, or rather he, looked at his new body and patted up and down as if making sure he wasn’t dreaming. “Finn? Why am I a white woman?”

“I’m not Finn!”

“Then who–?”

“I’m Evelyn! And you’re me!”

“No, I’m Dan!”

“Holy shit, both of you shut the fuck up!” Dan’s voice boomed out with an aggression I had never heard before. With an uncharacteristic scowl on his face, he stomped across the room with one crutch thumping on the floor, grabbing his hearing aid and popping it back in. “I swear, you two each have one half of a brain cell and you can’t figure out how to rub them together. I’m Finn. You’re Dan. You’re Evelyn.” He pointed at each of us in succession. “We just switched bodies.”

I looked down at my hands: calloused, rough, dirty around the fingernails. I was inside Finn’s body, using his voice. Daniel was inside of mine. Suddenly, I was tall and heavy and the back of my throat tickled from the burn of cigarette smoke.

The real Finn, wearing Dan’s physical form but still sporting that severe, intense frown on his face, put a hand on his hips and looked at the clock on the wall. “If this is anything like last time, we just have to wait it out for a couple of minutes. Just…try not to hyperventilate and pass out.”

“Okay. Fine…This is fine.” I took a heavy breath, leaning against the wall. It felt weird to be so big and blocky and square. “Hey, Finn? Your back is killing me. How goddamn old are you?”

In hindsight, it was hilarious to see Dan’s face glaring at me with the most serious, no-nonsense expression I had ever seen. It just wasn’t like him to look like he could legitimately kick my ass, nor was it like him to take control of a situation so effortlessly. I have to admit, I liked him more when he was just a big, dumb goof.

Thankfully, the goof was still in the room with us.

“I don’t like this.” The real Dan said, my voice coming out of his mouth as he hunched over, uncomfortable with the new body he was stuck in. My condolences. “My head is pounding and I’m freezing and I think I bumped my nipple on the desk and it really hurts–”

“Daniel Esperanza, don’t you touch my nips!” I pointed at him, and he recoiled with both hands in the air, one eye wide and freckled cheeks bright red in almost an instant. God, did I actually blush like that?

“I wasn’t gonna!” He squeaked hoarsely, shoving his hands in my coat pockets to prove his innocence. “I’m just saying, you’re very sensitive in places that I don’t usually–”

“Stop.”

“And your mouth is really dry, did you even drink water today?”

“You’re making this weird–”

Meanwhile, Finn was propped up against the desk with his fingers squeezing the bridge of his nose, stuck in a shack with the two biggest idiots in the universe.

Maybe he had a point about the whole ‘half a brain cell’ thing.

​

For auld lang syne, my dear…

The radio crackled again. A red light was coming from the screens, bright and blinding in a dark room.

For auld lang syne…

The clock on the wall was moving again, the minute hand circling the face so quickly that it became a blur.

We’ll take a cup of kindness yet…

Outside of our shack, daylight turned to night and back again in a matter of seconds. It was like watching time race backwards impossibly fast, every sunrise and sunset burning our eyes.

For the sake of auld lang syne.

​

A bell was ringing in my ear, so loud that it made my skull vibrate and my teeth chatter. I was cold, standing outside in the wind. When my two eyes adjusted, I could see the endless forest up the mountainside. The view was different than what I remembered: same place, same mountain range, but there were no lights from the village. No concrete, no radio tower.

And somewhere in those pine-covered peaks, a thick bank of fog was swirling and quickly spreading down toward the treeline.

My heart started pounding. I looked down at my feet and saw buckled shoes, stockings, and rickety wood floors beneath me. I was in a high tower made of planks, a massive brass bell ringing in my ear. People were yelling down below, their voices far away but the panic so familiar.

“Thomas!” A man screamed. He was standing in the snow at least twenty feet down from where I stood, his hands cupped around his mouth to yell up in my direction. He wore a raccoon tail hat, a shotgun hanging off his shoulder. I didn’t recognize him. I didn’t recognize anyone. “Ring the bell! You fool, why did you stop?!”

I looked at my hands, tanned and calloused from rough work. They were still wrapped around a thick piece of rope. I remembered a moment like this, perched on top of the old Pinehaven church, ringing the bell as if my life depended on it. It did then, and it probably did now. I pulled with my entire weight, the brass bell above my head making a low metallic drone before it finally chimed, the sound carrying for miles and miles. The pain in my ears was impossible to ignore, my arms were burning, my hands felt like they were on fire.

​

Somewhere in the deep, echoing hum, I heard the music on the wind:

We two have paddled in the stream…

The fog was racing closer, tumbling over itself like rolling waves.

From morning sun till night…

I pulled the rope as hard as I could, the stilts under my feet shaking. My legs were growing weak, my hands were beginning to bleed.

The seas between us Lord and swell…

My hands slipped and the rope slid out of my grasp, sending me falling to my knees. Sore, bleeding palms were flat against the wood, and the air around me was growing stale and dark.

I heard the static from a headset. I heard the buzz of flickering lights up above, a lightbulb struggling to come back to life. I saw the familiar floor of our tiny wooden hovel. I inspected my sore palms, seeing that the blood had gone and the pain was starting to fade into a memory. Still, my heart was racing out of control.

Finn was sitting propped up against the wall, a hand on his chest. Daniel was next to me, lying flat on his back and panting as if he had just run a marathon. I watched him pat at his face, his body, making sure he was back in his own self again.

“I think…we’re back home.” He said between heavy, wheezing breaths. “What the hell is going on? This…did not happen last year. Remember last year? It was boring and normal and it was great.”

“Yeah, well, things are changin’, buddy.” Finn said, pushing himself up and cracking his back as he stood. He paused the moment his eyes settled on the window, standing as still and frozen as a statue. I watched him, waiting for him to blink. “Don’t…move…” He whispered.

My curiosity got the better of me. Craning my neck over the broadcast desk just enough to see through the lookout window, I peered into the cold, snowy night while holding my breath as if waiting for something to jump out and grab me.

What I saw was far less violent, but far more chilling. Dozens, if not hundreds, of deer were standing in the clearing right outside our shack, shoulder-to-shoulder and staring directly at us with dark and unblinking eyes. Some of them had extra antlers. Others had additional eyes or two noses. Some had human hands instead of hooves at the bottom of their legs. I could hear their strange and haunting bellows, the thump of their steps against the frozen ground.

All three of us sat completely still, afraid to move. Afraid to blink. The window was clouded by hot breath, the deer huffing and puffing warm fog into the frozen winter air. The harsh glower from their eyes felt like a warning, a threat, made all the more terrifying by their uneasy stillness. They were waiting for something.

All at once, we heard a jaw-aching scrape that came from all sides. It was the sound of antlers clacking against the thin wood walls, dragging along the chipped paint and digging into the pulp. We heard hooves stomping above, the horrible and warped groans of elk. Dust fell from the ceiling in thick clouds, the thin plywood cracking and the bulb above our heads shaking like a spotlight.

And we heard the call: a great bellow that shook the whole world. Something was rising above the pines, massive and heavy and adorned with curling antlers. It was the head of that amalgamate beast, severed at the neck and larger than a house, levitating and leaving a trail of blood and sinew beneath the open, steaming wound. Its mouth opened, revealing sharp teeth that went all the way back into its throat. The sound that came out made my bones tremble.

One hundred eyes opened to the sky, purple and shining like beacons. It looked at us. Its glow burst through my skull like a white-hot flame the moment one of its eyes met mine. All at once, I wasn’t in this world anymore. I wasn’t on this earth. I was in a place I couldn’t describe, between time and space and life and death and everything in-between. I was one with it, and that thick black blood was pounding through my veins like the roots of a tree that connected us all.

I felt as if I was a part of everyone who had ever been lost to this forest, everyone who had ever made that blood sacrifice. My father. The Forest Rangers. The sleepwalkers. Jennifer.

​

For old acquaintance be forgot…

I was remembering a night I had tried to forget. It was New Year’s Eve. I was drinking champagne, stuck in a crowd of people I didn’t know. Jennifer was dancing with someone else.

And never brought to mind…

10…9…8… Time was ticking down and my heart was racing. I kept my eyes on her, trying to stick with someone I knew. She looked so pretty in gold.

Should old acquaintance be forgot…

7…6…5…4…

She spotted me and gave a huge smile, lifting up her glass. She just had her braces removed. Her arms reached for me in a hug.

For the sake of auld lang syne?

3…2…1…

As the crowd erupted in a cheer, I felt her lips on mine for the briefest second. I didn’t have a chance to close my eyes or kiss her back - I was too surprised. She was drunk. She probably didn’t realize who she kissed. She probably forgot about it the next day.

We never spoke of it again.

​

The floor of the shed was hard and cold against my back. The dingy yellow light above our heads was swaying, slowing until it stopped moving altogether. I heard that ticking again: simple, rhythmic, normal.

I sat up quickly, blinking my eye in the dim light and struggling to catch my breath. Almost immediately, I turned my gaze to the clock. It was 11:59 again. My legs felt like they had been filled with mashed potatoes, shaking weakly and numbly when I stood. Daniel was already sitting at the broadcast desk, a hand to his forehead as sweat dripped down his face. Finn had a hand on his shoulder. I think he got the effects of that light worse than we did.

“It’s counting down again…” I said breathlessly, huddling near my coworkers - my friends - as time ticked on. Thirty seconds left before midnight. “Do you think it’ll just keep…changing? Forever?”

Daniel was squeezing my hand, shaking like a leaf in the wind. Finn was staring forward at the fresh, falling snow. It glittered in the dim red light of the radio tower that loomed above.

Ten seconds left.

The horizon was eerily quiet. The sky was dark, the trees were still, the wind was whistling between the planks of our ramshackle broadcast station. The crows were still perched at the treeline, ruffling their feathers and cawing up at the stars and wisps of snowy clouds.

5…4…3…2…1.

And for the first time, we saw the minute hand click into place. Our computer monitors followed an instant later: 12:00, midnight. January 1st. 2023.

I let out a breath so big and so tightly-held that it burned. The hour was over. We made it to the brand new year, standing in the exact same room where it all started. My travel mug was still warm on the desk. The pen I had been tapping against the wood sat right where I left it. Auld Lang Syne, the Guy Lombardo version, started playing through the headphones just as it had been set. And when 12:01 appeared on the clock, the three of us finally relaxed our shoulders like three frozen statues that had finally been released from time.

“Happy New Year, you dumbasses.” Finn said. He gave me a casual side-hug first, then ruffled Daniel’s fluffy head of hair. “Take a breather and then get the hell out of here. Go celebrate, drink some grape juice or somethin’. Take a nap.”

Taking a nap sounded great, but easier said than done. I sat down, my hands sliding down my face in exasperation. My heart had been pounding out of control, but now it was slowing to the usual pitter-patter of constant, reasonable anxiety. I looked over at Dan, who still had that far-off look as if his soul had been ripped out of his body. I tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention and signed with my hands: Happy New Year.

It made him smile, finally. He signed back, picking up his half-empty energy drink and tapping it against the ridge of my travel mug.

“So, bud…” I raised my eyebrows. “Did you remember to write down those phone numbers from the raffle?”

Daniel’s smile disappeared and his eyes widened half-way through a sip from his can. He stared off into the distance for a few uneasy seconds, before whispering under his breath: “Aw, shit.”

This is Evelyn from the 104.6 FM Emergency Broadcast Station. And on behalf of myself and the two idiots I share a brain with, Happy New Year. And good luck.