In keeping with their name, Per Contra has released the story “Gold & Rust”—an extended meditation on suicide and infinite regressions—to coincide with the ubiquitous festivities of the holiday season.

The clouds thinly keep the sun wound up in a gauze, and there’s a constant whisper, some secret: the sound of all those stalks of grass touching and slipping together as Cuth weaves in among them. He tries to break it down, to hear not ten thousand blades but only one, just one narrow finger of grass, the individual that makes up the whole. But he cannot. He can’t identify the one from the many.

“Gold & Rust” is a companion to “Adventure Stories for Men & Boys” (originally published in the Adirondack Review) and “After the Intromit” (which first appeared in Slice).