Abigail Skinner

74 Short Story

Snow falls and silence is a slammed door in your face. Has there ever been a sound before now? You cannot remember, cannot recall the scrape of a car engine or the ringing of a telephone or the nauseating murmur of a television with the volume turned too low. For a moment your heart is broken, but it passes quickly. This is why you came here, after all.

*** He made no announcement of his leaving other than a hastily scrawled note stuck to the refrigerator with the magnet version of a drawing Caleb did in first grade. It was an owl, the drawing. Or a cat. He was never quite sure and afraid to ask; he didn’t want to hurt Caleb’s feelings. It was black, the owl-cat. He knew the note would hurt her more than the leaving, and maybe that’s why he did it. Why he chose that magnet over the one advertising a real estate company or the one shaped like a palm tree that she bought on a trip to Florida. For days afterward he could not comprehend his own malice. Was not aware his body housed the type of man who could do something so wretched. But he has long surpassed acceptance by now. *** When he came here he was not sure how long he’d last. His father was a woodsman, built this cabin and the three others scattered across the Yukon. Every piece of meat he ever ate breathed its last breath in his father’s hands. But he never wanted to learn, always turned down his father’s offers to go fishing or small game hunting. Something about it made him sick to his stomach. He did not ever want to be responsible for a living thing’s cessation. And yet. He had brought books with him, twenty-five. Most of them he knew nothing about. He’d just grabbed the smallest paperbacks off the shelf in his office and piled them in his duffle bag on top of the three changes of heavy winter clothes he had packed. And even as he reads them in the cabin during the silent hours of days that seem to come and go too quickly, he barely registers the titles or the words on the yellowed pages. Some days, he takes one of the books outside and reads out loud to the trees because he thinks maybe they will make better listeners. But somewhere between his mouth and his ears, the words become nothing more than sounds that have no meaning, and the trees are just trees, and they do not care one way or another. They cannot hear him. *** Caleb had never learned how to swim. They had tried, had put him in classes and then, when he refused to get in the water with the other kids, hired private teachers to give him lessons. But he hated the water. Screamed when it touched him, as though the chlorine reacted like acid against his translucent skin. “He has to learn how to swim,” Emily had said, over and over.

“We’ll try again in a couple months, okay? Maybe he’ll be over it by then,” he’d said, knowing the older Caleb got the harder it would be for him to learn. He was almost eight. Most kids his age had been swimming for half their lives already.

“He has to learn how to swim, Daniel.” “He will, Em. I promise.” I promise, I promise, I promise.

***

It has been almost three weeks since he left. The air outside grows colder and the days shorten; light lasts only a few hours. He reads but does not comprehend. He sleeps but does not dream. He eats but does not taste. He tries not to think of Emily, of their son; he thinks of them too much.

Here, in the middle of the winter-bare woods, there is nothing to keep him company but the sound of his own breathing.

*** I’m sorry, Emily. I need to get away from this for a bit. Going to the cabin. Don’t know when I’ll be back. –D

Emily found the note stuck to the refrigerator when she walked into the kitchen to make herself tea before going to work. Yellow lined paper, red pen, Caleb’s owl magnet. The one she always used to display his A+ spelling tests or his yearbook pictures. And she knew that Daniel’s choosing this magnet was not an accident, but she was not angry, not about the magnet or the leaving. She took the note down, folded it, and placed it in the drawer of the desk that sat beside the refrigerator. She made her tea. She went to work, and she hoped he had remembered to pack extra socks. *** On the twenty-third day, he spots a snowy owl outside the window, perched on a low branch of a naked spruce tree ten feet from the cabin. It is the first living thing he has seen since he arrived. He goes to the window, stands close enough that his nose touches the icy glass. The owl stares at him for a few seconds, then turns its head completely around in the grotesque way that owls do. If he lets his eyes fall out of focus, the owl disappears, blending in peacefully, exquisitely, with the bitter brown limbs of the tree and the snow covering the ground. Refocus, and there it is again, motionless, regal. Vanishes and reappears with each blink.

He knocks one knuckle against the window, hard, and the owl swivels at the sound. It watches him without blinking, then flies away.

*** It is the owl you think of as you refold your dirty clothes and place them back inside your duffle bag, when you stack each of the twenty-five books you read into a pile on the mantel above the fireplace. You won’t be taking them back with you; you don’t need them anymore.

You have been gone for a month, but it feels like a year. The quiet, the stillness of the woods has made you think differently of time, and for a moment you feel sad to leave the trees and this place. But then you remember. The earth does not care for you, does not cradle you in its branches or long for the sound of your weeping. The earth does not care if you stay or go.

So you go. And the sun remains the sun, the sky remains the sky, and, yes, the snow under your feet gives way beneath your weight, but don’t worry. It will fall again.

75 Short Story