The Snow Globe Shows Next Winter

The snow globe came in a box lot from an estate sale — a heavy old glass globe on a wooden base, containing a finely made little model house on a little hill. I bought the box for other things and the globe was a throw-in, and I put it on a windowsill and forgot it, until the grandchildren shook it and I noticed what the snow did.

It doesn't fall like snow. When you shake it, the white flurry swirls and then settles, but it doesn't settle onto the little house at random — it settles into a picture. A scene, rendered in the drift and the way it lies, momentarily, before it slowly sinks: a scene around the little house, made of settled snow, holding for a minute or two, detailed enough to read, and then dissolving as the flakes finish falling. Different every time. And the scenes, I realised slowly, over weeks of unsettling shakes, are not random and are not of the past. They're of what's coming.

Small things, at first, that I only recognised in hindsight — a shake that settled into a scene of the little house with a fallen tree across its garden, and then, a week later, the storm that dropped our neighbour's beech across our shared fence. A shake that showed the house ringed with cars and a crowd, days before the street party nobody had yet organised. I started paying attention. I started, cautiously, keeping a note of what the snow showed and what then happened, and the correlation stopped being deniable: the globe settles into a picture of my house's near future, three weeks out, give or take, in the drift of its false snow.

The flood was the one that frightened me into telling someone. I shook it, idly, last month, and the snow settled into a scene I couldn't parse at first — the little house, and water, a lot of it, lying across the little modelled street, up to the little door, the whole miniature scene drowned in settled white made to read, somehow unmistakably, as flood. I noted it, uneasy, and told my wife, who told me to stop shaking the horrible thing.

Three weeks later the culvert up the lane blocked in a cloudburst and our street flooded — the real water up our real door, exactly the scene the snow had drawn, three weeks early, in a globe from a dead stranger's house.

I've since done the thing the globe seems to want, which is the frightening thing: I've started acting on it. When it shows something bad, I try to soften it — I cleared the drains before a shake that showed water; I've warned neighbours of trees the snow drew falling. It seems to work; the futures it shows arrive changed, gentler, when I heed them, which raises the question of whose winter it was showing before I started to interfere, and whether the estate it came from ignored it, and what happened to them.

I don't shake it for fun anymore. Once a week, deliberately, I shake it and I read the snow and I write down what's coming to my little house on its little hill, and then I go and try to change it, and the globe, patient on its windowsill, seems content to keep showing me next winter, three weeks at a time, for as long as I'm willing to keep looking.