A visit to the october country — 2023

It’s like the leaves are trying to taunt him.

By mid-September, they have all developed a jaundice, the crouch before the leap. We are ready, they say with each rustling breeze. We are ready, are you?

For the first time in some years, his answer is an unequivocal yes. No rushing this time, except for the ways in which one is always rushing at the end of something — rushing to conclude, or rushing to prepare for what happens next, or just rushing because that is what we humans do and it is easier to embrace the default mode than it is to fight against those powerful currents of society. And he does rush to many things, harried by those taunting leaves. There are birthdays and weddings, work events and interesting happenings, each of them stacked ever-so-slightly too close together on the calendar.

“Soon enough, when the leaves change, I’ll have a minute to breathe,” he repeats, often enough to become a mantra.

As he crosses states in the car, he murmurs: “Soon enough, when the leaves change, I’ll have a minute to breathe.”

Buried under an aural avalanche of conversation, slowly digging his way out, he hears like an overtone hidden in the voices: “Soon enough, when the leaves change, I’ll have a minute to breathe.”

What happens, as always, is that the leaves begin their change without his noticing. That jaundice does not snap forward in a single thunderclap of color — too wet, too strange a year (aren’t they all, nowadays, he hears said in stores and bars and fields) — but instead with a shake, the trees begin to go to rust. He checks his calendar, sees that he still has time. His bag is packed, he’ll be ready, there’s no need to rush. Much to do between then and now.

And so it happens that he finds himself away on the night when he is meant to pick up that bag, to make his fateful and annual way. He didn’t think about it, he was in fact rushing. He wouldn’t trade any of it, any of the things he’s been flinging himself across space-time to be a part of, but that potential for a minute to breathe seems as remote as it did weeks ago, when the leaves warned him to prepare. He did prepare, he listened! And yet!

As he lays down, fitful and tired on a mattress not his own in a place he does not call home, his already-sleeping wife murmurs something that he can’t quite make out. He’s tempted to ask her to repeat herself, but he doesn’t want to wake her, doesn’t want to take any second of rest from her when he knows just how precious those moments are. But she reaches for his hand as he begins to close his eyes and it’s like she passes him something, a handoff on the edge of wakefulness.

On the platform, he looks down and sees a ticket envelope in one hand, his bag in another. On the envelope is a note: “I got the tickets. See you tomorrow.”

She is coming a day late, in order to tie up a loose end of her own. He knew that, and yet he’d forgotten. Rushing, rushing, rushing…

At the bottom of the ticket envelope, another note: “Someone Russian is bound to slip on a banana peel! Xo”

He will do better, next time. Next year. Tomorrow. He did alright, this time. The leaves are there to tell him so, as he takes his seat on the train and waits for the conductor, his old annual friend. He hears the man call out to the platform, announcing the train’s destination, and as the train begins to pull away, he opens up his bag and ponders where to begin...

The 2023 October Country Reading List

  • Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

  • Disturbance by Jenna Clarke

  • Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire

  • McSweeney's Vol. 71: The Monstrous and the Terrible, edited by Brian Evenson

  • Gothic by Philip Fracassi

  • Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

  • Calamities by Renee Gladman

  • A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand

  • Sucker by Daniel Hornsby

  • The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies by John Langan

  • The Shining by Dorothea Lasky

  • The Book of Love by Kelly Link

  • Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon

  • Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

  • The Wonder State by Sara Flannery Murphy

  • Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott

  • White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

  • Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante

  • Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

  • Bellwether Rhapsody by Kate Racculia

  • Gallant by V.E. Schwab

  • Knock Knock Open Wide by Neil Sharpson

  • Spa by Erik Svetoft, translated by Melissa Bowers

  • Midnight on Beacon Street by Emily Ruth Verona

  • Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig