Dead of Winter ~ First Place
Meredith Lindgren
Photo Credit: James Gates/Flickr (CC-by-sa)
The sky did not lie that morning, clouds covered it as some indecent warning of that which can never be prepared for in adequate fashion. They would turn the world white. They blanketed even the ground and hung down as if in some attempt to find reflection.
It was a year to the day since Amelia hadn’t lived.
Nick and I needed to go into town to get some supplies.
We could stay there. Or we could go right through.
We could go right through the next town and the next town and the next. We could go and never stop, but we won’t.
We’ll return to our one room cabin with a loft for the bed, open to the bottom floor. Separation, but no privacy, except the bathroom.
We almost expanded the place last year.
We started to.
The cats, Mittens and Boots, watched us from the window of the loft. They would not go outside again for days. Country life is sometimes simple, but never more so than city life.
Before we left for town, we cut as much wood as we could. More money for food. We broke down building supplies.
As the morning passed the sun did not come and the cold did not go, it worsened. The sun hid its place in the sky, dim and evenly dispersed, an indicator of day.
We piled the wood up next to the stove. It almost covered the door. If the weatherman was right, in a day’s time we wouldn’t be able to leave the house anyway. The birds and small animals skittered frantic, never far from their nests and holes.
We got into the car.
“Do you have the list?” Nick asked.
“Won’t matter,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
It meant that the shelves would be picked. We would get what we could. The wood should have been cut the day before, the supplies acquired, but our mare, Joan, had begun to birth a foal. Though we had attended the birth and given it our best efforts and lost sleep, we lost them both. We should have done better.
Death comes in threes. Last year had been unseasonably warm. The first two deaths had been chickens, taken by coyotes. We didn’t talk about the third.
Amelia.
A year later, death had come again. Two down. No telling who the storm would take. I turned to Nick.
“It’s all up here,” I said. I pointed to my head and grinned.
“Can you tell me where it is in the house so I can go get it?”
“It’s also in my pocket,” I said.
“Can I see it?” he said.
I showed it to him.
He looked at it. “I don’t know why we had to do all that,” he said.
There was no reason. Numbness drove me. I felt none of the urgency I should have. This had been true for some time. My notice of it was occasional.
He started the car. “I love you,” he reminded us both without looking at me. He squeezed the steering wheel.
“I love you,” I said back.
I didn’t look at him. I looked at the day. I looked at the year. I looked away but it all looked the same.
The truck tried to make it up the hill. More and more the truck tried to make it places. It made a noise. Chunky, like everything fixed inside it had come loose.
It sputtered. Something tight contained, connected to the other noise in an indiscernible way. We ignored it because we didn’t have time for something like that.
The car hissed and steamed. It died.
Much as it could for something that had never been alive.
“Shit,” Nick said. He hit the steering wheel. CPR for cars, it never works. For CPR to work, you have to break ribs.
Cars have no heart or breath to start. No ribs to break. There were no numbers attached to their deaths. They die alone without envy of our threes.
We got out and looked under the hood.
“There’s a coolant leak,” he said. “We need to patch it and put in more coolant. Otherwise the engine will get too hot and will just run itself into oblivion.”
We were just between the general store and our home. Two miles in either direction.
We didn’t have any coolant or patches. He undid the stick that held the hood up. It slammed back into place. The first flakes fell onto it, melting with the heat left by the engine in some strange taunt.
We looked in both directions. The birds had not yet stopped their calls, beseeching nature not to run her course. More snowflakes were quick to follow.
“We won’t make it to the store and back,” I said.
“No. We won’t.”
He turned to walk home. I followed.
I had a hat with flaps, but my ears were numb within five minutes.
Don’t get me started on my nose.
I tried to walk up close with Nick, for warmth, but it was hard to keep up. He was walking as if trying to lose me.
By the time we got home the birds were silent. It had snowed four inches. About one every ten minutes. We started a fire. We stood in front of it. There was nothing to say. The fire popped and crackled. Boots and Mittens wound around our ankles.
We sat at our table and shared a can of chili for dinner. If all had gone as planned, we each would have gotten our own. He went up to the loft and there produced a bottle of whiskey from the depths of his bottom dresser drawer.
“I was saving this for the next storm,” he said.
“This storm.”
“Yup.”
It raged outside. The wind howled, stealing any other sounds.
I took a drink straight from the bottle. There was no reason to be fancy. It was warm in my chest, my blood coming alive.
“We should take a look at what we have,” I said.
“Won’t change anything,” he said.
“It will help us ration,” I said.
“That it’d do.”
He lifted the bottle, tilted it. It was less than half full.
“I might switch to the cheap stuff.”
“Smart,” I said. We were past the point of caring about quality.
He got the bottle I had known about from out of the cabinet. It was no fuller than the other. We would have picked more up at the store. Even with both, the whiskey wasn’t going to last us the storm.
“I might be okay for now,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
The electricity went out. A log cracked in the fire. We went to bed. To say we made love ignores the other feelings we made as our bodies worked and writhed in expression that may well have been meaningless for all it told us about each other.
I searched his face for my own feelings, but it was too dark.
A log cracked in the fire.
I searched his movements for my own and though he stirred inside me, the only feelings I could discern were my own.
Once done, we separated, some mystic push away from each other. We came back together for the warmth. Our limbs did not intertwine.
Weightless, I could feel our stillborn daughter between us. I had all year.
She had been fully formed and came out with my body’s leftover heat. Perfect. Nick hadn’t been gentle as he had pressed his two fingers into her chest, one’s not supposed to be for CPR to work.
It was hard to say if we had her in common anymore.
Two feet of snow kept the doors shut. Wind howled.
I listened to the absence of the steady gentle hum of electricity, sudden and noticeable when it was gone. The world was too unstill for it. Unsaid things moved around inside me like Amelia had. A light snore formed in Nick’s throat.
I woke to blank light and silence. Each lay upon the world, equally distributed across all surfaces. Snow fell onto itself. It reached past the sill, filling the window. The wind had ceased. The birds were silent. Nick was silent.
A silence beyond sleep.
I did CPR. I broke his ribs. I touched his heart, but not hard enough for it to start beating and bleeding and all the things it had done again.
I did nothing.
I started after he’d stopped making his own warmth. Like her, any heat he retained was borrowed from me.
At what point he died in the night, there’s no way for me to tell.
I tried to call emergency services. The lines were down. We didn’t have cellular phones. We lived beyond service.
I screamed. I cried. There was no witness to any of this. I realized that I had the luxury of unobserved grief. I could cry all day or not at all. I could say that either had occurred.
Upon this realization I stopped.
I started some breakfast for myself. I got the fire going with the embers left in the stove. Heat spread through the room.
I would need my strength to get Nick out of the bed. At some point I would need to lay down again. It was the only surface in the house for it and I wasn’t going to give it up for a corpse.
I ate plain oatmeal. We were out of butter and sugar. Each were things we had intended to get at the store.
I fed the cats the parts of Joan and her dead foal that we had had time to cut out and wrap up. Whether the hide and the bulk of the meat from either animal would be salvageable would be clear when the snow was gone.
When I was done, I went up to the loft. I put my hands under Nick’s armpits. I lifted to no avail. I got his head and shoulders less than an inch off the bed, even using all my strength. I collapsed onto my side.
He turned to me.
“Hello, handsome,” he said, just like the night we met.
“You’re dead,” I said.
I had not said that the night we met.
“Do dead men talk?” he said.
“No,” I said. I believed it at the time.
“Well then,” he said. “Let’s start over. Hello, handsome.”
All the gestures and facial expressions remained the same. The human mind is a wonderful thing. This conversation didn’t seem like something to do, but he repeated himself.
“Hello, handsome,” he said.
“Handsome, but I’m a girl,” I said again. It was what I said the night we met.
“It’s the golden rule,” he said. “Treat others as you want to be treated.”
“I do. Or, I do try,” I said. The first night I had just giggled.
“You shouldn’t lie to the dead,” he said. “We know.”
He went back to being dead. I no longer had anyone to talk to. It was a relief. Now I could get back to moving him.
I did not put my hands back under his armpits, but rather his shoulder and hip. I rolled him. He hit the ground with a great thud.
I lay across the bed.
It felt so normal. This was something I’d do after changing the sheets.
It felt so abnormal. Someone had died here just few minutes before. Minutes adding up to hours in all likelihood, but a blink in time however dissected.
I shifted so that all of me remained on my side.
I looked over to the empty space next to me. I could feel the inanimate nature of the body that lay just beyond my sight. Still I lay as time existed outside of me. The snow obscured any of the sun’s telling. It piled on and on in silence. Tears ran gentle down over my nose, outside my control and like all things without a sound.
It was only when I stopped that he sat up.
“Why did you let our daughter die?” he said. He had never been so straightforward as to come out and ask.
“Why did you?” I said. I had never been so straightforward as to come out and ask either.
“Me,” he said. “You were the one carrying her. What did I do?”
“You were never there for me. You were never there for us.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“You weren’t there for me,” I said. “For us.”
“Excuse me for trying to make some money so that I could support us. Besides, you’ve said as much before, but what more could I have done? Climbed in your skin and lived life for you?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“No. You don’t be absurd. You’ve said I wasn’t there for you, but what more could I have done?”
“Something. You could have talked to me. Helped me when I was sick. Brought me food. That’s what you could have done. There’s an in between living life for me and what you did which made me feel alone. It made us feel alone.”
“She never got the chance to feel anything. And I wish I could have carried her inside me. I wouldn’t have been so proud. I wouldn’t have tried to do so much.”
I had continued to work a lot.
“Maybe I did do too much. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t been hungover so much. You were always somewhere, drinking with your friends, leaving me alone. Us alone. She would have lived if I hadn’t felt so alone.”
He collapsed back to where he had been all along.
“What?” I said. “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”
He lay down again. There he was on the floor, broken ribs. Flat lack of breath or muscle tension.
I got up and changed the sheets. I wrapped him in the old ones.
I laid back and let the silence overtake me. The eeriness of the unexpected. I waited for him to speak again, but he didn’t. The snow kept falling. The hidden sun made for a day without time. I was hungry.
I made grilled cheese and soup. Warm food helped keep the house, body and soul warm. Something a person needed in a storm like this.
I started bleeding after lunch.
My period, right on time.
Part of me had hoped I wouldn’t, that some part of Nick would live on. This time his absence would be expected. That would make it tolerable.
Pads were something we would have bought at the store.
I didn’t worry about what Nick would think as I cut up a towel, our brown one that was fluffy and soft, but wasn’t as new as some of the others. I didn’t care about his judgement as I stuffed it in my underwear.
It would work fine.
The phone lines were still down.
I paced in the dim and sourceless light.
The plan had been to talk to each other and read. I picked up my book but couldn’t focus. Tears came again. They couldn’t last the possibility that this time they were not for him, but rather for myself.
I paced and paced at a steady pace, faster than the hours crawled on. Darkness came on. The wind started again, the snow did not stop. Nick could sense the evening.
“Are you going to sleep with me in here, like this?” he said.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Are you going to stay up all night? My mourning widow until morning?”
“Even sleepless mourning widows are removed from the body.”
“What next then? Are you going to push me down the ladder? Aren’t you afraid that I’ll break? Don’t you love me too much for that?”
Did I?
“You’re supposed to,” he said. “You can blame me all you want, but love goes far to keep things alive. I could never tell how much you loved anything.”
I dragged Nick by his feet. I stopped at the edge of the ladder.
The sheet had fallen off of him. I pushed him. He hit the rungs. His body hit the rungs. He was gone. The way it hit the floor was more solid.
I could never tell how much he loved things either and for a second, it was me that was dead and he was standing above me broken body that he had just pushed down the ladder. I was him and he was me. It was so vivid, it had to be true. It was nothing like the night before when he’d been separate inside me.
It passed. We were ourselves again. In our little home.
The outside world was so far away, it might as well have not existed. I continued to sit and watch him, lifeless. I looked down on him from above, bloating and bruising. His eyes were open. No more could I feel him watching me, either from above or below. Even though I wanted to believe in Heaven.
It was a grey dusk that came. And with it a hunger. And with it a girl. She was ten, an age Amelia had never reached, but I recognized her. There were his eyes, my hair, his chin, and my cheekbones.
His lips parted to say, “Why didn’t you want me?”
She was gone, but I said, “I did. What are you talking about?”
I went down the ladder and put the sheet back over Nick. I went to get the bottle of whiskey that would be my dinner. Not having to share anymore, I only needed the good stuff. Boots sniffed at the sheet.
“Boots, don’t,” I said. “Don’t, Kitty.”
But I didn’t move to stop her. I watched her sniff about.
“How long are you going to let her do that?” he said.
Boots moved to chew on his toes. I shooed her away. She would drift back and I would have to deter her again.
I put more of the cut-up towel into my panties.
I drank the rest of the bottle and passed out to her chewing noises.
It was dark when I woke. The cats were curled up, warm beside me. Out the window, I could stars in the sky. The clouds were gone, the snow had stopped.
I was hungry. I had to step over his body to make my stew. I had to put wood in the fire to keep it going.
While it heated I dragged Nick from the base of the ladder. I did not take him far. I didn’t want him in the kitchen area or too close to the stove. I lay him down by the window where he would stay cold. I ate.
“You could offer me some,” he said.
“There’s more,” I said.
He sulked.
“I could heat it up for you,” I said.
“Is the phone working yet?”
“What you don’t want to hang around the house with me? You think it’s boring to be expected to do nothing, to just sit there looking pretty?”
“You still think I’m pretty,” he said.
I’ll admit, though I didn’t when questioned, that did make me curious. I went over to the sheet and lifted it. Even in the dim light of the fire I could see, his blood had begun to pool as gravity dictated. I poked at his back.
“You have blood pooling,” I said.
“It happens,” he said. “It will happen to you.”
I didn’t tell him, but it wouldn’t happen to me like that. Whatever happened, I wouldn’t let it happen to me like that. Bones had broken in the fall. They floated around inside him, banging against his ribs. His skin was bruised.
“Only after I die,” I said.
“You don’t have to rub it in.”
I smiled.
“Do you think you’ll be blamed?” he said.
“I think I’ll be questioned. Blame must placed.”
“I want you to be blamed,” he said. “It’s your fault. You killed me.”
But I didn’t. I hadn’t. I turned to go upstairs. Amelia stood at the top, six, now.
“You told more than one person that you didn’t want children,” she said. “You told your best friend when you were my age. You told your first boyfriend. And your second. You told me.”
“I told you that you were changing my mind. By the time you were here I wanted you more than you can imagine.”
She turned into the sun which was rising.
I went back to bed. I laid down, hoping to get back to sleep. I didn’t want to be awake any more than I had to. The sun would be an unwelcome guest.
Though I couldn’t get back to sleep, I searched for a connection with widows who would stay up all night. Who reach for their absent husbands in the morning. I moved my hand across his pillow in motions I imagined they took.
His warmth would have been welcome. He was bigger than the cats. I had to go to the bathroom.
I cut off more of the towel. I threw what I had been using away. The cats had chewed the others, sucking out the juices and shredding the fabric. I picked up the pieces.
The snow filled the downstairs windows, dipping under its own weight in the middle. Light flowed from the loft.
The cat had bit Nick’s toe. It was red with blood, but it was not bleeding.
I went to the bathroom and cut up more of the towel.
When I came out, Nick turned to me and asked, “Would you have married me? If it hadn’t been for her? I’ve always wondered. When I do things right, sorry, did things right, it seemed like the answer was yes. But otherwise, I don’t know. It was pretty iffy.”
“I might have married you if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, but not when I did.”
This left him still and deflated.
I made myself a breakfast identical to what I had eaten the day previous. I had enough of yesterday’s lunch and dinner to do the same, but we would see.
Mittens rubbed against my leg. He looked up at me.
“You’re thinking of feeding me dry cat food, aren’t you?” he said. It was the first time he had ever spoke. “Don’t you ever want more,” he said. “I want more.”
I patted his head. I would give him some of Joan’s foal, so much like my own human child, when it came down to it. He had a point.
But first I would feed myself.
“I agree with the boy cat,” said Boots. “Sometimes I want more.”
“You may not forever,” I said to her agreeing with the boy cat.
She rubbed against my leg in the same way he did. One difference was that I was secure in the fact that she wouldn’t spray the walls. As though she could occupy a space, but did not need to own it. Lines did not need to be drawn.
Not in her mind.
She was naïve.
“You can have some of Joan’s foal,” I told her. “Both of you,” I told them.
Nick sat up under his sheet.
“You again,” I said. “I’m tired of you.”
“Sorry to be an inconvenience,” he said. “I’m curious about whether the phones are up again.”
They weren’t, nor did we have electricity. The storm was over, but I was still waiting.
“We’re still waiting,” he said.
“So we are,” I said. I ate in front of him. I didn’t offer him any.
I let the cats sniff my spoon. They did not eat any.
“You’re practically feral at that point,” my mother said.
“You’re not dead,” I said.
“The dead are easier to be haunted by. Anything we say might be something that you want to say to me, but can’t. That will occur to you in the future.”
She was right.
“I know I’m right,” she said. The first time one of them responded to my unsaid thoughts.
To ignore them was to ignore my own mind. There was silence from all of them with this revelation.
The cold white world provided no supplement. All life beneath the placid surface. Death which would not be found in nooks and crannies picked by animals that had wanted nothing more than to survive the storm.
Inside was the home where I did the same. The dead man in the corner. The ghosts dissipated. Silent cats padding along, searching in corners for food until I would give them some.
I looked up as if I was a small animal waiting for food to be delivered. Rather than becoming accustomed to the quiet, it grew. It seeped in through my eyes, nose, mouth and ears. It exploded in my mind.
They all came back again.
“If you had wanted me more, I would have lived,” Amelia said, though she was a baby now. Too young to be talking.
“See, even she agrees,” Nick said.
“It might be for the best,” Boots said. “You can’t even feed your animals on time.”
I got my coat.
“Plus, it seems awful, this predicament you’re in,” my mother said. “But with the grades you got and your basic looks, this may be as good as it gets for you. Although you do need to find another man, as soon as you can. And for the love of God, keep the baby alive this time.”
I got my boots and snowshoes.
I opened the door to the outside. Snow piled in. I would have to dig my way out. They would talk to me the whole time. They were talking as the snow fell in.
“Great, now we’re all going to die,” Mittens said.
“I don’t mind,” Nick said. “It will preserve me. In certain cultures, you would have been expected to throw yourself on my pyre in mourning. This works, though.”
“What kind of mother are you?” Amelia said.
“The kind that would kill her own mother,” my mother said.
“You’re not even here,” I said.
I went up the ladder to the loft. I looked out the window. The drop was about six feet from the sill. How bad it would be would depend on the density of the snow.
“If I was here, you’d find a way to kill me,” my mother said.
The drop would be fine. I emptied the cash out of Nick’s wallet and put it in my own.
“Now you’re robbing me,” he said. “My mom was right.”
His mom was always so nice. What did she say about me?
It was all in my mind.
It wouldn’t stop.
It was all in my mind.
It was all my mind had made out of something.
I lifted one leg and then the other out of the window. I sat on the edge. Only my bottom was still inside. There was no heat to the day. I hopped down. I sunk about a foot into the snow.
I stepped out from the cavity I created, up onto the surface of the snow. Even with the snowshoes I sank into it with every step, but kept walking. They called to me from the window.
Taunts and apologies.
There was no one to hear them.
The world was bright in a way that had to be witnessed. Brightness like that could not be imagined. I would be snow blind the following day, but that was okay. In town they would have been plowing the roads until they couldn’t. They would have started again as soon as possible.
I wouldn’t need to see to take the next bus out of there. I would take it to the next town. To the next town then the next.
Even far into the white that I hoped was the road, I could still hear them yelling from the cabin.
Meredith Lindgren graduated Summa Cum Laude from Metropolitan State University of Denver in Colorado with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. She has worked as a childcare worker, a radio co-host and currently an appointment setter. When she is not setting appointments, she spends her time talking herself out of secluded cabins in the woods. A previous Three Cheers and a Tiger Winner, her work has appeared in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal and Subprimal Poetry Art. Email: suavegossamer[at]yahoo.com
