November's Fall

by Igor Zenin · 2017

A glass orb rests among drifts of dead leaves at the edge of a misty pond, bare branches suspended inside it like a whole tree caught mid-collapse. The forest around it has already gone gray and skeletal, every trunk fading into fog a few yards back. Deer move faintly through the mist on the far shore, barely more than suggestion. November's Fall treats late autumn as something you could pick up and hold — fragile, cold, and already halfway to winter.