@emilyseatingtacos

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Breakfast

Sno’ Witty™ woke up to an ambient temperature of fifty-one degrees inside the hallway and knew, without checking a device, that the celestial axis had tilted.

Today was the Autumnal Equinox.

The astronomical death of summer.

In coastal lifestyle magazines, autumn is a glossy spread of chunky cable-knit sweaters, artisanal stoneware mugs, and golden leaves tumbling artfully across cobblestones.

In the Midwest, autumn is an abrupt sixty-day hostage negotiation between light outerwear and catastrophic frostbite.

Breakfast was half an apple cider donut purchased four days ago at an orchard that was eighty percent gravel parking lot and twenty percent angry yellow jackets. The donut was now roughly the consistency of floral foam.

She leaned over the kitchen sink, dipped it into black coffee that had dropped to lukewarm, and watched the street through the blinds.

Across the cul-de-sac, the neighbor had already deployed three rectangular bales of decorative straw and four polyester scarecrows onto his lawn.

Sno’ Witty™ chewed slowly.

Nothing communicates hospitality quite like stacking three hundred pounds of dry, highly combustible agricultural bedding five feet from your vinyl siding to celebrate the death of plants.

Bane approached the back sliding door, sniffed the crack beneath the rubber seal, and touched one front paw to the damp patio concrete.

He made a noise in the back of his throat like a deflating accordion, turned around in a tight circle, and marched straight back to the living room rug.

He will not be participating in the equinox.

Lunch

Lunch was a single cold bratwurst retrieved from a square of crumpled aluminum foil in the meat drawer, wrapped in a half-sheet of generic paper towel, and squirted with store-brand yellow mustard.

She forgot to shake the bottle first, so it discharged two tablespoons of lukewarm mustard water onto her wrist.

She wiped it on the paper towel and ate the bratwurst standing up.

She had ventured out earlier to the hardware store for furnace filters.

Civilization was currently being held hostage by the ornamental gourd cartel.

Crates of lumpy, wart-covered squash sat near the automatic sliding doors, looking like produce that had survived an industrial radiation leak in 1974. Nobody eats an ornamental gourd. You simply purchase four of them for twelve dollars, arrange them in a wooden bowl on the dining table, and watch them silently liquefy from the inside until the third week of November.

Behind the gourds stood an endcap of seasonal impulse items: pumpkin spice motor oil, pumpkin spice dental chews for senior dogs, and pumpkin spice furnace scented wax cubes.

A woman ahead of her in line was wearing sheepskin boots, running shorts, and a heavy hooded down vest.

The official tri-seasonal uniform of a populace in deep atmospheric denial.

Sno’ Witty™ bought her pleated air filters, declined the extended warranty on an eight-dollar rake, and fled.

Dinner

Dinner was a baked potato microwaved until the skin resembled luggage leather, topped with a single slice of American cheese that melted into an impenetrable plastic shield.

She ate it with a teaspoon because Travis had dismantled the silverware drawer.

Travis was not eating dinner.

Travis was performing the Ritual of the Storm Windows.

The equinox triggers an ancient, non-negotiable directive in the suburban male nervous system.

He had removed the fine mesh screens from the storm door and carried them into the garage, where they now leaned against his workbench in descending order of width.

He had retrieved the heavy winter glass inserts from the rafters and laid them across two sawhorses.

He was currently scrubbing the aluminum channels with an old toothbrush dipped in soapy water.

Scrub. Wipe. Inspect.

“The lower sweep has lost three millimeters of rubber,” Travis announced toward the garage drywall. “Negative pressure is pulling cold air right under the sill. We’re heating Cook County.”

“It was sixty-four degrees this afternoon, Travis.”

“It’ll be forty-two by sunrise,” he said without looking up, tapping the glass with a screwdriver. “Dew point doesn’t negotiate.”

He also switched the furnace on for its maiden burn of the season.

Within four minutes, the entire house filled with the signature perfume of late September: baked dust, scorched hair, and decades of dormant duct lint sizzling against red-hot heating coils.

The scent of winter’s vanguard.

Bane had abandoned the kitchen floor entirely. He had wound himself into a dense, eighty-pound velvet sphere on top of the braided rug, his nose tucked completely beneath his left flank to preserve internal heat.

Sno’ Witty™ sat down on the sofa and pulled a fleece blanket up to her chin. It smelled faintly of last March’s cedar chips and damp wool.

Outside, the dusk was arriving twenty minutes earlier than it had last week, falling over the neighborhood like wet gray flannel.

In seven weeks, it will be pitch black at 4:30 in the afternoon, and the entire population will subsist on shredded cheese straight from the bag while staring vacantly into the blue light of their phones until April.

She took another bite of potato leather.

Winter was coming, but the weatherstripping was clean.

It wasn’t happiness. It was compliance with the calendar.

Good enough.