Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
By morning, the cabin had settled into a deep, vibrating cold that made every surface hard as glass. The fire in the main room was the only heat left, and it had already eaten half the wood stacked beside it, flames shrinking to embers unless fed every hour. I woke to the sound of Mom rattling around in the kitchen, the shriek of the faucet followed by a string of muttered curses.
She wore two pairs of pants, a hooded sweatshirt under her vest, and a scarf wrapped so high it nearly swallowed her nose. When I came in, she was hunched over the table, breathing into her hands, eyes bright with a kind of caffeine mania.
"The pipes are frozen," she said, waving at the sink. "I think the line in the crawlspace must be blocked."
I nodded, moving to the window. The snow had plastered itself to the glass, all light outside gone to a uniform gray. "The power’s out," I said, not bothering to sugarcoat it. "It went sometime after midnight."
"We need to ration the wood," I said. "If we burn too fast, it won’t last until the plow comes."
She nodded again, smaller this time. By dusk, the cold had burrowed into the house like a living thing. The walls wept condensation, and the inside of the windows grew a second skin of frost. I watched Mom as she tried to light the gas stove in the kitchen. Three clicks, then nothing, then three more, a ritual of disappointment. When she gave up, she dragged the extra blanket off her bed and curled up on the floor in front of the fire, back to me, knees tucked to her chest.
I let her shiver for a while, then said, "If you want to warm up, you could always join me." She looked up, eyes glassy. "I’m serious," I said, patting the spot beside me on the couch. “Right now, body heat is the only kind of heat we have.”
Mom didn’t answer me at first. She kept her back to me, huddled in a ball in front of the dying fire, shoulders shaking slightly, not from cold but from the effort required to keep her fear and panic from spilling over. I knew the shape of her stubbornness better than I knew my own hands. The silence in the cabin was absolute: no cars, no wind, just the faint tick of the quartz clock nailed crooked on the kitchen wall and the soft undertone of settling timbers, as if the house itself had decided to brace against the weather and wait it out.