By Tyler Sones

Featured Art: I Tricked You by Brooke Ripley

For Halloween you dress up as a mountain woman, a pioneer. You model your costume on a lady in National Geographic—a porkpie hat, a complicated blanket draped around your shoulders, bedsheet as petticoat, bedsheet as skirts, and some turquoise earrings you got in New Mexico forever ago. It’s hard to choose between shoes and sandals. After months of cooking dinner over carpet fires, there’s only a week or two left of it in the living room, beige and pinned under the couch legs and the La-Z-Boy. Both are too heavy to move on your own. Dinner tends to taste like singed hair. You consider going barefoot but the floor is so cold.

Your husband Jimbo doesn’t dress up as anything. He knows how much you like Halloween, though, and he’s really a very sweet man. He clomps up from the basement, claps out a rhythm on his knee, and hoots like a catcaller while you twirl, spinning your skirts around you, smiling till your cheeks are sore. He presents you with one of the long beef jerky tubes he’s been hoarding down below. You start eating at one end, he starts at the other, and y’all meet in the middle and kiss.

When you’re alone again you peek through the blackout curtains. The trees are blueprints for monsters, leafless, with their hands up like please don’t shoot. You haven’t seen a car pass by since who knows when, or anybody walking a dog. The neighbors keep their curtains drawn too. If things return to normal, you’re pretty sure you can return alongside them, but Jimbo’s been spoiling himself in the basement over his sprawl of battle maps and there’s no way to tell whether he’s gone peculiar or gone for good.

Thanksgiving morning you bring his breakfast down and he tries to explain a crucial event, how the width and breadth of the Blue Ridge Parkway got blown to smithereens by drone swarms launched from Studio City, California. He introduces you to the losing general, a wad of dryer lint with toothpicks for antennae. The victor straddles the Mississippi Delta, a He-Man action figure in a tiny tam o’ shanter. In one plastic hand a barbarian’s sword, and in the other a flower origamied out of one of Jimbo’s soggy old Playboys—held aloft, V for victory.

He expects you to follow the troop movements and understand what he understands. He makes gunfire noises and thumps the vanquished from the table. When he swipes his hand across the southern states, it’s like you’re not even there. A FEMA truck flies all the way from Georgia to land in your cleavage.

You don’t feel good about any of it—Jimbo, the war. You haven’t slept a whole night through since Easter.

Across the street a brave new neighbor installs an inflatable snow globe beneath the scorched catalpa tree, the one that used to shoot off beige flowers in the springtime and droop with seed pods all summer long. Poor tree. The snow globe starts small but grows the more he fusses with it, bigger and bigger until it’s a fortress. The new neighbor wears a helmet and so many clothes you can’t tell what he is, a lady or a man. You sort of dream about him being a lady. You wave but nobody ever waves back. Maybe you’ll bake some banana bread with make-believe bananas and the last square feet of carpet. Welcome to the neighborhood. The snow globe reminds you to nag Jimbo again about the Christmas decorations.

He gets surly when you do.

That’s not a snow globe, you dingbat.

Okay, smart guy, you holler down the stairs, if it’s not a snow globe, then what the heck is it?

Time burrows like moles under the wallpaper, the naked floors, as still as can be until you close your eyes—then it makes a break for it and the next thing you know it’s Christmas.

You’re going to have to start writing things down. Everything gets too easily confused with everything else. Sandals and shoes, Christmas and Hanukkah. One thought will ricochet off a daydream into the belly of a memory you haven’t had in years, and that memory, gutshot, will whisper its last words in your ear. You’ll try to listen but the wooden bird will startle you when it cuckoos out of its clock, scaring up whole flocks of real birds, from when there were birds, out of real leafing trees. Predator birds and prey birds tunneling through the air. All you’ll be able to do is shut your eyes and watch. It used to be so easy to tell the good things from the bad.

Through the curtains, the snow globe is a wide Christmas eyeball that doesn’t blink the world away, that can’t.

And now the way your breath snags when you try to breathe deeply, it reminds you that the angel of death has passed over your house once again. Maybe Jimbo did paint lamb’s blood over the door when you asked him to weeks or months ago? But of course he didn’t. Of course it’s just plain luck. Everybody is waiting to be chosen.

And you know it’s not a snow globe out there. You’re not the dingbat.

When you step outside and shut the door behind you, it doesn’t feel cold at all. It looks like it should, but all it feels like is nighttime. You leave your sandals where the doormat used to go. Jimbo won’t notice you’re gone until he calls for you and you don’t come, until he gets hungry. Maybe the neighbor, whoever he is or she is, will be hungry now. After all, ’tis the season. A beef jerky tube might not be banana bread, and it might be strange during peacetime, but it can really hit the spot during a war.

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Tyler Sones received an MFA from Ohio State in 2019. His work has appeared in New England Review, The Pinch, Beloit Fiction Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas and can be found online at tylersones.com.