The Candy Bowl

The week before Halloween, Diane Keller sorts her seven-year-old daughter Ellie's trick-or-treat practice haul and finds a folded slip of paper in the bottom of the bag, in a child's uneven hand: "thank you for the trade." Then things in the house begin coming back wrong. Not stolen, not broken. Traded. Ellie's favorite mug returns from the dishwasher with the handle on the left instead of the right. The smoke detector chirps at 3:00 a.m. every night, and when Diane takes it down, the battery is warm. Ellie starts leaving candy out, unprompted, on the porch steps: "for the trade." She says the new kids in the neighborhood taught her. There are no new kids in the neighborhood. The trades escalate from objects to behaviors to memory. By the final week of October, Diane understands the shape of what is happening, and she cannot tell anyone, because the thing doing it is wearing her daughter's routines, her daughter's voice, her daughter's bedtime songs, and it is better at being Ellie than Ellie ever was. On Halloween night, Diane goes to the community bonfire to do what the town has done for over a century: make the trade. Only she has realized, too late, what Anoka's founders must have known. A trade is never about what you give up. It is about what agrees to be taken.