Note: I made a list of prompts, and wrote a bite-sized story for each one. They don’t live in the same universe, but they’re all a little off-kilter from what you might expect from holiday fare. And if you pay attention, you’ll notice that the last line of each story becomes the first line of the next. Also? You can listen to these stories at my podcast website: BathtubMermaid.com.
Somewhere nearby, something shifted in the quiet, as if it had finally noticed them.
It happened at the moment the flame took hold. Not before, not after—right then. That was what stayed with me. Not the sound exactly, but the sensation of it: a subtle tremor passing through the outer ring of Valhalla Station, the kind you only noticed if you had learned to listen with your feet instead of your ears.
Valhalla sat on Jupiter’s fourth terraformed moon, a place humanity had coaxed into cooperation with pressure, patience, and very good math. The engineers said the structure adjusted constantly—temperature differentials, micro-gravitational drift, orbital corrections. All perfectly ordinary. Still, the timing felt personal.
There were thirteen of us gathered under the dome that cycle, if you counted the dog, which I did. Twelve humans in a loose, imperfect semicircle, one slightly enhanced dog in a holiday vest and taking the occasion very seriously, and an AI drone hovering politely at the back, its indicator light dimmed as if it understood that brightness was already being handled.
The menorah sat on a low table, and it was not impressive in the traditional sense. It had been assembled–cobbled together really – from spare parts over several years: a section of copper conduit for the base, mismatched bolt heads for candle cups, a curved piece of polished hull scrap bent just enough to suggest intention. Someone had engraved small hash marks along one side with a laser tool set slightly too high, giving it a faintly scorched look. It was whimsical in the way frontier objects often were—clearly made by people who needed something to exist and made it any way they could.
The shamash sat a little higher than the rest, because someone had decided that detail mattered.
No one there was particularly observant. A few weren’t Jewish at all. But Hanukkah had a way of widening the doorway. Light was light, after all, and the station nights were long.
When the match struck, the flame appeared small and unassuming against the dome’s cool-blue illumination. Jupiter loomed beyond the glass, vast and molten, its storms rolling in bands of rust and gold. Someone had once joked that celebrating Hanukkah here made the planet look like the universe’s largest dreidel, and the thought lingered, quietly absurd.
The shamash caught first. Its flame flickered, steadied, and was lowered to the first candle. The wick glowed, hesitated, then lifted into its own flame—cleaner, calmer.
That was when the tremor returned.
It wasn’t violent. It didn’t trigger alarms or shift the mugs on the table. It felt more like a breath being taken by something very large and very old. The kind of movement that reminded everyone present that this world had not been born this way—it had been persuaded.
The shamash guttered a moment later. A small cough of flame, a soft hiss, and then it went dark, having done its job.
Only the single candle remained.
No one spoke for a while. Even the drone held position, as if it had decided hovering was a kind of listening.
Eventually, explanations surfaced. Someone mentioned thermal adjustment. Someone else suggested orbital debris. The geologist, without smiling, said station ghosts. The dog offered a sound that landed somewhere between agreement and applause.
Food appeared. Fried onions mingled with recycled air. Latkes ranged from excellent to deeply theoretical. Sufganiyot were passed hand to hand. The AI asked permission to catalogue “culturally significant carbohydrates” and was told yes, but not directly over the food. It adjusted itself by three centimeters and seemed pleased.
Conversation filled the spaced the way it always did – warmly, unevenly, generously. Stories were told. Apple sauce experiments were defended. Laughter bounced gently off the curve of the dome and faded into Jupiter’s slow, endless churn.
Through it all, the candle burned.
It did not flare. It did not waver. It simply stayed.
Later, when the plates were empty and the voices softened, I looked at it again—the single, steady flame, holding its place in a structure built to survive storms that could swallow planets.
And I thought about that first shift in the quiet. About how something had moved, or noticed, or adjusted itself just enough to make room.
A tiny flame held its ground, steady against a universe of storms larger than Earth itself.
