As the Eye Can See

Note: Review contains spoilers throughout!

This one bills itself as “A short story about the day before Halloween”, and that is exactly what it is, but with layers to it—over the course of the story we see four different days before Halloween over nine years in the life of the main character, starting in 2024 and traveling backwards, the protagonist de-aging as the story goes on. The descriptions are evocative and lovely, and the first-person prose has a slow quietness to it, asking to be savored. We see scenes and moments, but the connecting tissue is left for the reader to fill in, which I found very effective as I slowly put together an understanding of both what happened in between the vignettes and the significance of the cottonwood tree under which the story begins.

“I like this tree quite a bit,” the protagonist says in the first scene. “I remember coming here last year and thinking the same thing. The curl of its branches and the smoothness of its bark. That’s why I like it.” But the story builds to a moment, nine years before, that completely recontextualizes this claim. On that day, dressed in a princess costume, the protagonist travels with her parents to a corn maze where she anticipates finding “my kingdom, my castle, my home.” And in her child’s imagination, that’s exactly what happens, traveling through the maze and reaching the castle, then ultimately, “Finding a nice spot at the edge of the kingdom. A tree that could pierce the clouds. A funny kind of curl to its branches as it waves hello. Sitting against it, its smooth bark holding me upright. My throne.”

This scene is the first time we’ve seen the protagonist’s mother; something happened to her after this, and all the days-before-Halloween in the future are colored by this memory, of magic and wonder and the mother’s presence, contrasted with the loss of it all. On that longest-ago day, the protagonist relates, “Mom told me that today I’d become a princess. […] Looking out from the highest perch of the balcony at the furthest points of the kingdom, as far as the eye can see, the world with me at its center.” But this scene ends with the line, “I was a princess again the next day, but not for much longer after that.” With the loss of her mother, the idea that she is at the center of the world and nothing can go wrong for her is shattered.

In the scenes that take place over the intervening years, the day before Halloween is cold, costumes disappoint, the protagonist’s father is disengaged, and an incident at school taints even dressing up as a princess. Finally, in the present, we see the protagonist refusing to acknowledge the meaning the cottonwood tree has for her. When she takes a photo of it, she derides herself as “Too sentimental for my own good”. Her holding back from describing the emotions she feels about her mother’s death/absence leaves readers to fill them in, which is exactly what I did, feeling for myself everything the protagonist isn’t saying, and I found that very powerful. After getting to the end of the story the first time, I immediately replayed in order to experience it again through the lens of my new understanding, and by the time I reached the ending the second time I was tearing up. A beautiful, melancholy, understated piece.