Aurora used to be a good girl: did her homework, helped her mum, lit up the Arctic sky with magic.
But at 15, she fell in with a gang of constellations.
They loiter at the harbour, play pranks on the whales, and reave the night sky of its lawful splendour.
Kati likes to write about snow and ice. This story was inspired by two separate trips to Iceland, where she failed to see the Northern Lights.
Gloom is a thing with feathers, too: it’s perched over my childhood like a pigeon, flapping its dirty wings and doing that dull Sunday coo that means my friends are out of town, the library is closed, and it will be a decade before I’m old enough to move away.
Kati lives in France, writes short fiction and often thinks about cheesecake. Some of her stories are at vocal.media/authors/kati-bumbera.