It’s been over a year since I last posted anything. So here’s a story for you, one which I’d forgotten about until today while going through old notes and stories and things. Enjoy!
He stood up a bit stiffly and stretched his limbs, gun slung over his shoulder and a small pile of silent rabbits at his feet. It had been a fairly productive morning. He had stopped for some time by the water to think, drifting in and out of the present. After standing up and regaining focus, he gently threw the tied-together rabbits over his shoulder, carrying them like a burlap sack and looking much like a rugged Father Christmas. Walking carefully to his small boat, which rested half on, half off shore and bobbed in the ever-so-slightly undulating water, he hummed quietly to himself an old Christmas hymn, the name of which he couldn’t remember (but this didn’t matter, he told himself; it was the tune and the comfort it gave him that he cared for).
He swung the rabbits around and plopped them inside the boat, then, stepping over the boat’s edge and sitting on the bench, he picked up the paddles and began the short trip back to the cabin-side of the lake. (Should you ever find yourself on that small body of water, you would call it a pond, but it was his and he called it a lake, and so it was.) The morning sun shone through the broken clouds in rays that he liked to think of as slides running from heaven down to earth. Those rays gave some warmth to the otherwise crisp, almost-winter cold – not an unbearable cold, but the kind one can smell, a cold that elicits images of happy Christmas markets with sparkling lights strung about, snow on the ground, and people carrying bags and parcels and cups of hot drinks leaving behind swirls of steam. It was the kind of cold he loved; it made the insides of one’s nostrils freeze with every inhale and exhilarated even the most tired mind. He loved this time of year.
He reached the other side and pulled the boat onto the gravelly shore, then swung the rabbits once more over his shoulder and carried them up the path to his cabin, the wooden sanctuary he had called home for the last twenty-some years. The cabin was every bit as woodsy as one might imagine: a dark log exterior, small porch and rocking chair, simple windows whose panes glowed a comforting yellow on snowy nights. The latched door he opened easily with a gloved hand. In all the time he had spent there, he had never worried about thieves or scavengers, human or animal, breaking into his home; no one and nothing meddled with the peace he had established upon his arrival. (Nothing, that is, except the small, shining device he somewhat unwillingly kept on the rough-hewn table where he ate his meals.) Despite his love for the cold, he welcomed the warmth that enveloped him as he walked through the cabin door; it reminded him of his humanity and dependence on something other than himself for survival.
Placing the rabbits on the floor by his feet and shaking off his coat and boots, he sorted through the day’s mental checklist, which was not especially complicated. After hunting, he had simply to prepare the animals for storage and supper, tidy up the cabin, and, what he looked forward to most, write.
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The day passed as most every day before had, quiet and uneventful. As the sun crossed over the sky and slowly lowered, taking with it its warm rays, and as the last bits of gold shone through those small window panes, he finished his supper, placed the dishes in the sink, then sat down at his desk. Turning on the ancient desk lamp, he prepared to write. But no thought came to mind; no inspiration burst forth as had happened every night before this one. He simply could not think.
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After what seemed hours of staring blankly at the page before him and occasionally tapping his pen on the paper, he looked up and noticed snowflakes gathering on the outer window frame, in front of which his desk sat. Exactly when it had begun snowing, he didn’t know, but he watched it intently now. After several minutes, he slid the window open a few inches and felt the cold on his face and hands. Leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes, he listened to the silence, that sweet silence that only snow can bring; it covers one like a blanket and softens everything. He heard the silence and felt both the cold from outside and the heat from the wood stove that burned nearby; the mixture of warmth, the occasional breaths of cold air, and the smell of snow brought him to the brink of sleep.
Just before his mind passed into oblivion, the shining device on the table buzzed and lit up. His eyes slowly opened, and he looked over at the phone. Any time it made its presence known in this way, he acknowledged the disturbance by stopping whatever he happened to be doing and glancing at its screen; he read the messages or looked at the pictures sent to him but never offered any response. His three children had given up on calling; they knew he had drifted far from the world of modernity and assumed he had no desire to come back, which, for the most part, was true. Keeping this one connection to the too-quickly advancing world outside his self-made sanctuary was the one indication that some part of him missed that modern world, or perhaps wanted to be a part of it, if only for his children’s sake.
[They had parted ways years ago. He couldn’t remember at this point how long it had been, only that it felt like eternity, but he still remembered their voices. His children, one daughter and two sons, were close in age, the oldest and youngest only four years apart, and each had married and had children of their own. Because it was so geographically difficult to visit their father, and because he did not, to them, seem interested in leaving his home, the three had decided several years previously to send their father a box in which they had packed a cell phone and detailed instructions for its use. He was impressed upon receiving it from the deliveryman, for very few even attempted the road to his cabin. He had thanked the man with a cup of hot coffee. After taking the device from its packaging, he had looked it over, followed the so thoughtfully written out instructions, and placed it on the table, where it had remained for the majority of its time in the cabin.]
After looking at the phone for a few moments, he slowly stood up, walked over to it, and touched the screen. Uncharacteristically, tears formed in his eyes as he read the few words his eldest son had written: Happy Thanksgiving, Dad. I love you. The words, though he had seen variations of them before, for some reason held a deeper meaning then. Perhaps he had kept himself in solitude for too long, had irrationally avoided the world outside his self-contained patch of land; perhaps his aloneness had been eating away at him for some time, and these words forced him to acknowledge that. Whatever the reason, he felt strangely renewed and again sat down at his desk to write.
He feverishly, almost unthinkingly sketched a story as an artist would a figure drawing, leaving enough out that anyone reading it could add their own colors and details, could make it their own while maintaining its original form. The skeleton was there, the bones of the story, but the rest was left to whoever might read it, should its contents ever leave that desk…But would it ever leave that desk? Why should it? It was his story, after all, not for others but for him. He wrote for his own enjoyment, as an outlet for that imagined world he had been so long and unconsciously composing. Others he felt could not fill it as he wished it to be filled; his world could only be peopled by the figures he alone had imagined and would imagine. Why should he allow others to share in his writing? It was his and his alone.
But somehow he felt it was not. The story originated from his mind, yes, but where had his mind found it? As he sat at his desk, now only half-feeling the still snowy cold and the stove’s warmth, he allowed his thoughts to converge, his focus to shift inward and senses to be dulled to his immediate surroundings. He detected, he thought, a light of sorts, something there that he could only perceive if he did not focus on it, like a star whose light is seen only if one looks at the blackness surrounding it. The light flickered slightly as he watched, or rather did not watch, and it took five minutes of trying to focus on it for him to realize he had forgotten where he was. He forced his mind back to his cabin, to his desk, the cold and the warmth, the snow.
He looked again at the phone still resting on the table. As he had done many times before, he rose and walked over to it, but this time he picked it up and found in its limited contacts list the name of his eldest. Never before now had he used the phone to speak to his children, but he felt at that moment the time had come; he had grown tired of being alone and tired of the guilt he felt every time he saw that screen light up. He hesitantly touched his son’s name, put the phone to his ear, and listened to the ringing.
Eternity passed.
“…Dad?”
“Hi, son.”
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