Featuring poetry and prose by established and emerging writers, Capsule Stories Winter 2020 Edition explores the theme Bare Bones. Read wintry writings that tell of loss and heartbreak in the coldest season of your life. These stories and poems are open and vulnerable as writers lay bare their grief, sadness, and tiredness. Allow yourself to feel those feelings and be vulnerable as you read this 200-page literary magazine. But remember that it gets better, and spring will be here soon.

Bare Bones

It begins with the chills in the morning as you pull up the comforter and wish for five more minutes. When you realize that the sky is just a little bit darker, that your windows are fogged up in your car. When you take a walk and look at the massive trees towering over you, branches pointing at the sky, and you wonder, do the trees ever get tired of standing? Perhaps the wind threatens to blow them down, but there they stand, stoic, strong, unmoving. Their colorful leaves have fallen, and their branches are dark, like wooden cracks that have shattered the sky.

Slowly, day by day, the entire world changes.