How to Buy a Snow Globe

by Matt Leibel

Buy a normal globe. Spin it around, like a roulette wheel on its axis. Close your eyes and place your index finger anywhere on the globe’s surface. When the sphere stops spinning, open your eyes and note the nearest big city. Drop everything—buy a plane ticket there. It doesn’t matter if the place you’ve chosen is an equatorial sauna; they’ll likely have snow globes for sale. Buy one at the shop at the airport gate, at the hotel, or from some kid selling them out of milk crates just outside the train station. Walk the streets of the city in a daze; why did you come here, without a plan? Why are you such a willing vassal of chance? All of the homes and offices and pharmacies and streetcars and parks and hot dog vendors and mad bullhorned preachers hotwire your senses. For the local, you suspect, all of this energy has lost its novelty. The city is just the backdrop for routine, the early morning jog, the grab-and-go coffee, the subway crush of rush hour humanity. You recognize this robotic dance of dailiness only because you’ve found a way to sidestep your own, at least for a few ticks of the clock.

Sit in your hotel and stare into your tiny domed souvenir. Think about how shrunken landscapes are a perfect metaphor for the ways the past recedes in memory. Think about how when you return to your own college campus decades after graduating, the town looks like a toy, a desktop accessory: Lego dorm rooms, students like figurines in a diorama. Everything that once felt vast and capacious and high-stakes now appears cloyingly cutesy, like a bedazzled cashmere sweater for cats. Hold the globe close to your eyes: closer. Keep looking until you enter its blizzardy abyss. Gaze out on the mirror world through the plastic bubble. You should have brought your winter coat; you should have brought your scuba gear. But different laws apply here: you’ll survive. This is your new life. Everything is simplified. It’s just you and a skyline: maybe a bridge, maybe some trees, maybe an iconic monument. Maybe a castle, maybe a city mascot, maybe a gargantuan guitar. And snow—great, salty flakes of snow, never ending, always swirling around you—like the headlong rush of obsessive thoughts you could never quite shake, until now.

Matt Leibel's short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024 and Best Microfiction 2025. Find him online at mattleibel.com.

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