Dying with Her Cheer Pants On

by Seanan McGuire

Take a breath. You can taste the autumn in the air, smell it in the breeze, feel it dancing on your skin. The walls are thin. Now is the time, because here we are again: here we are on the border between now and then, between here and elsewhere. The trees have donned their holiday best, gold and crimson and orange shining in the sunlight. The air smells of corn husks and deep, decadent green, of loam and woodsmoke and petrichor and apple skins and hay. Pumpkins swell in their earthen beds, skins waxy and firm and colored like an autumnal rainbow, orange and red, white and yellow, even phantasmal green. Day by day we have spent the summer, tossing it one coin at a time into the wishing well of tomorrow. Things have changed. We have changed. We are changing still. Now is the time to roll the bones and gamble everything once again. Now is the time to turn the year around. Pray for her. Pray for us all. Because once begun, it cannot be stopped; it can only be survived. She isn’t always a survivor. Last year’s incarnation was weak, and the winter burned. Pray for her, and for the times ahead, which must be endured if the wheel is to continue to turn.