Between Stillness and Fire
Light, memory, and the quiet architectures of defiance (Sep 28 – Oct 11, 2025)
New to Brittle Views? This space spans grief and mischief, punk nostalgia and quiet reckonings—essays, fiction, satire, and stories that don’t sit still. If you like writing that lingers as much as it lands, you’re in the right place.
It’s been a fortnight rather than a week—travel and movement offering their own kind of pause—and in that space, my writing found a slower rhythm.
Stepping back reminded me how easily pace can mask presence, and how absence, too, can clarify what matters. This stretch reminded me that writing doesn’t only happen in the act itself—it gathers quietly, like sediment in still water, forming shape beneath the surface until the moment feels ready to move again.
These pieces trace what happens between stillness and fire: the friendships that steady us, the families that remake us, the boundaries that soften into trust, and the voices that rise when silence has lasted long enough.
In The Light That Stays and The Light Between Us, friendship becomes inheritance—grace passed quietly between hands. That same light moves into family—into hands that draw, hold, and rebuild.
Holding On – Chapters Twenty and Twenty-One extend that current into family: a daughter sketching her grandfather’s stories, a household learning that love can be rebuilt through creation.
From the stories we pass down to the ones we never tell, the question of what endures—and what we choose to leave unspoken—threads through each piece.
Maggie B. returns in Counted, Not Named and This One Doesn’t Count, reminding us that what’s left unrecorded can still shape a life—that silence itself can be a form of truth. And Unbroken closes the fortnight with a single, steady breath of resistance: the sound of standing when the world demands quiet.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that this stretch began in stillness and ended in fire; we’re always relearning how safety and defiance can coexist.
Together, these pieces map the tender ground between those states—where safety, connection, and courage learn to live side by side.
Here’s everything from the past fortnight—each one a small testament to what endures when we choose to stay open to the light:
Essays
What looks like distance is often defense. Some of us learned stillness as survival—how to hold our breath long enough for the storm to pass. This is an essay about what happens when the walls we built for safety start to let the light back in.
There are traces of our friendships in the smallest things—the way we phrase a kindness, the patience we offer a stranger, the stillness we keep when words would only get in the way. A meditation on friendship as a living inheritance.
There’s a light that lingers in certain friendships—the kind that outlasts distance, silence, and change. It doesn’t flare or fade; it steadies. A reflection on quiet endurance and the love that keeps showing up.
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Holding On
A letter reopened, a story retold, and a granddaughter’s sketchbook waiting in the wings. Grief meets renewal as memory begins to move again.
Emma’s drawings become a bridge between generations. In the hospice room, memory turns to collaboration, and a family begins to build forward instead of only looking back.
Maggie B. Casefiles
Before the gnomes and fig-bar treaties, there was a train platform, a bag of tangerines, and the first unnumbered case—the one that started it all.
A clipping, a crease, and the kind of record that forgets what matters most. Records endure, but they rarely remember the names.
Poetry
Defiance is breath ripped back from smoke. A poem about standing when silence would be safer.
Each piece catches its own edge of that light—stillness where it heals, fire where it resists, and the faint promise of what the next spark might become.