The Cabin

Fresh prints scrunch in the crystalline white layer behind her, new since last night and gently caressing the rolling hills beyond and draping the skeletal trees in its cool embrace. Her lungs are a blazing inferno as she pumps her legs, kicking up plumes of snow like bullets from a misaimed machine gun pittering around her feet, and for a moment she imagines that she's a secret agent whose cover has been blown before she remembers that she doesn't have to imagine at all. Ten paces in the gnarled grasp of a root reaches up and snags her boot, sending her tumbling into the wet like an injured snow angel. She rolls onto her back, feeling the harsh bite of the frost on her face and hands, and summons up all of her inner pain into a shrill scream that would make harpies and banshees quake and flee. She screams unknown curses for forgotten infidelities. She screams hidden pain from the endless assault from all sides, from those who seek to teach her, from those who seek to help her, from those who are blind from their own masturbatory concerns, from the wire she uses to make real all the unplaceable atrocities in the bright red reminder against her pale skin. She screams until her already frozen lungs fail and collapse within her, and her throat feels like she swallowed the glass she put her fist through yesterday.

The sharp smack of the cabin door rings out in the world behind her, and he runs to her, the knight in shining armor but without coat or shoes, his dirty blond hair whipping in the shrill wind. He throws himself to the ground beside her, wrapping his arms around her in a physically awkward, really perfect embrace, hugging her hard because he's trying to let everything melt from her into him. She wishes she could cry but she can't, so she lies silently in his arms for a while, letting the cold chase away the adrenaline until she stands and limps back with him, hoping he is fooled into thinking he helped, ready (only not) for another day just like yesterday.