Cabin Fever

The snow began three days ago, but only now did we realize we might not leave. I sipped my tea, the mug burning my palms—a small, familiar comfort.

The Earl Grey—bergamot, lavender—reminded me of meeting Damien.

Oh, is this yours? I think I might have ordered the same.

You have good taste.

We’d both ordered the same drink at the coffee shop, each reaching for it as it was called out. His smirk, my awkward laugh. The warmth in his eyes, much like the mug in my hands.

I pushed the thought out of my mind. That was a long time ago.

I watched from the window, shivering in my blanket and sweaters as Damien raised the axe. His breath was white in the air. The snow pelted down in thick flakes, the wind tossing them. His gloves were no match for the cold. Even inside, my breath was visible.

I watched him chop wood, waiting for him to come back inside. The silence of the cabin was suffocating, the darkness of it englufed me. Damien kept missing the log, the axe biting into the stump with a dull crack. I waited for him to correct his swing, but he didn’t.

After the sixth strike, I realized he wasn’t looking at the log at all.

Damien then grunted into a loud yell, turning and throwing the axe onto the ground, letting it sink inches into the snow. He stooped down, gathered the pieces of split wood in his gloved hands, and trudged back toward the house, leaving boot-shaped prints behind him. He opened the door with a forceful swing, slamming it shut. He stomped the snow from his boots, shook the logs onto the woodstove’s hearth, and struck a match with frozen fingers.

His back to me, shoulders slouched, he mumbled, “This should last us two more days.” He was tired.

I was, too.

And hungry.

Before we left, I remembered him turning to me after another silent dinner. The Earl Grey lingered in our mugs.

This trip will be good for us. All that snow, some wine, and a fire. We need a break.

Maybe. Just a few days?

We can be back by Sunday evening.

I sighed, and he ignored me, removing his boots. My stomach growled, and I winced. He flopped on the couch, legs stretched to the fire. I heard his stomach gurgle too.

“I think we have a can of tomato soup left,” I said.

Damien said nothing, pulling on more socks. He looked at me shivering. If we were still young and in love, he might have held me. Instead, he let me freeze.

He went into the kitchen without another word, bringing the can of soup back. He sat back down on the hardwood floor in front of the fire and began heating the soup on the stove. His shoulders tense, his mouth flat.

The silence had become deafening to me.

It’s only supposed to snow for a few days, that’s what the news said. Just a light dusting. Should be romantic.

I sat beside him, tense. We took turns sipping the bland tomato soup from the same bowl.

My stomach growled as I slurped, imagining meat—something warm, weighty, to chew.

Then, I remember.

“Wait, I think I left some jerky in the pantry,” my voice edged with relief for the first time in days.

Damien doesn’t even glance up at me. He finishes his soup and stares into the fire, his face slack and unreadable.

I opened the pantry, searching every shelf, running my hands along the wood, desperate for crumbs. My stomach dropped, and my hands shaking with anger and disappointment.

I ran to the fridge—still cold despite the lack of electricity. Nothing. I opened the drawers, searching despite my eyes seeing nothing. I frantically opened each drawer in the kitchen, slamming them, as the silverware clattered loudly. I threw pots and pans out onto the floor, begging for it to be here somewhere.

Nothing.

Only dust and cobwebs, empty packages of food we’d already eaten.

Maybe I misplaced it.

Maybe I never brought it in the first place.

Maybe I imagined it.

“Where the hell is it?” I shouted, slamming a cabinet.

I walk back to the main room. Damien sitting placidly by the woodstove, eyes unblinking.

“Did you eat it?” I ask, practically yelling, my frozen finger pointed at him.

His gaze doesn’t move from the fire, as if he can’t hear me.

“Yeah. I ate it all after you fell asleep last night.”

“You selfish—” He cut me off with a cold laugh.

“Me? Selfish? Oh, honey, you’re confused. You’re not chopping any wood. You’re not sitting in the freezing cold, hunting for something, for anything in this weather.” He stood up, moving towards me, eyes dark.

“I needed it way more than you did.”

“You could have left one piece for me,” I shouted.

“I didn’t want to,” he crooned.

“So this is who you are when no one is watching, huh? When things get hard, this is who you turn into?” I spat.

“Jess, you’ve been selfish since we got here. You kept feeding the fire even after I told you we needed to keep it low to save the wood. You used up all the hot water we had left for your ridiculously long showers. I think a little bit of beef jerky was alright.”

“It’s already been five days since we ran out of food, and you decided to just eat the whole bag? You couldn’t even try and have some self-discipline and save some?”

He stepped closer, heat and smoke clinging to him, jaw tense.

“You are overreacting,” he said quietly.

Something in me snapped.

I shoved him, both hands against his chest. Hard.

He stumbled back a step, his body like a wall against my hands. He looked at me in disbelief, then surged forward, shoving me in return. My shoulder hit the wall, the cabin seeming to flinch with us.

Before I could even think, before I could stop myself, my hand hit his face.

The sound is sharp. Final.

He raised his fist, but stopped. Growling, he stalked down the hall, fists balled. Just before rounding the corner, he looked back at me.

The air was frigid, but my gaze is colder.

~~~

I awoke, body cold. The sky is still dark. The day and night melted together. Darkness and cold drowned the cabin; snow piled at the door. The car was halfway buried. Powerlines down. Rivers frozen. We are over an hour from town.

When we first arrived, it was just a dusting. Then the blizzard hit. The radio warned us, and for a moment, it was almost exciting. But soon the snow swallowed the porch rails and pressed against the windows. The wind died, and the radio nothing but static.

I pulled the blanket closer, stealing it from Damien. He grunted, reaching for another blanket, eyes shut tight.

He can freeze for all I care. Maybe if he had earlier, I would still have something to eat.

I stand up from our temporary bed on the couch, and walk to the large window again in the front of the cabin, my toes in my wool socks, still feeling as if they are ice. I slip my boots on for extra warmth. The sky begins to turn from black to a soft gray, and I can only make out more snow, blowing sideways in the wind.

The cabin smelled of pine, smoke, damp wool. The fire burned low, more smoke than heat. I added a log and blew on the flame, hands shaking. Only eight logs left.

Damien awoke at the sound of me blowing on the fire. He looked at me and then glanced at the logs near the wood stove on the floor. He yawned and, almost defeated, put his face in his hands. We didn’t say it out loud, but we both knew that if the storm didn’t break soon, we wouldn’t have enough wood to last us another day.

It had already been twelve days. The thought felt wrong.

Time no longer moved in a straight line. It stretched, then collapsed on us, passing in suddenly like the snow piling outside the door, and then not at all. Entire hours felt as though they disappeared without leaving a mark. Other days dragged so heavily I could feel them settling into my bones like the chill.

We kept recounting what little we had, as if the numbers might change.

There was no one else. No other place to go. No gear or tools to help. Nothing to do but exist alongside one another, breath for breath.

The thought terrified me.

We called it an impromptu weekend—time to start over, alone in nature. The truth: we were failing, and the feeling hung between us like our breath in the air.

“I’ll make you some tea,” I said suddenly, my voice sharp. I aggressively threw our blanket onto him, and he wasted no time wrapping it around himself, rubbing his hands and toes together.

The cold rearranged us. We would sleep in bed, backs turned, the space between us filled with years of unsaid things, unspoken memories. By the seventh night, we moved to the couch in front of the fire that smelled of dust and smoke. He would hog the blankets in his sleep. I told myself it didn’t really matter, and I let myself shiver.

I began to tell myself a lot of things.

I took the kettle and pushed against the front door, trying to open it. It felt as though it was frozen shut with ice. The snow piled in when I finally got it open, and a gust of wind took my breath away. I scooped some snow into the kettle and struggled to slam the door shut against the weight of the snow and ice, the doorknob so cold it felt as though it burned my fingers.

I set the kettle on the woodstove and stared at the fire, Damien getting up to swab halfheartedly at his mouth with some toothpaste and mouthwash.

We disagreed on what day it was. Telling the time of day out the window was a murky endeavor at best. The clock on the wall had stopped long ago, and our portable chargers were dead. Outside, snow erased anything familiar. Trees began to blur into one another. The sky and the ground seemed to be one color. One night, I had tried to grab kindling and thought I saw some sort of movement among the edge of the clearing, near where the field opened. I looked for tracks, a shape.

I found nothing.

By the sixth day, Damien began to check the door often. Not to open it—just to touch it. His calloused and cold hands would rest against the wood for a second longer than needed, as if listening for something. When I asked, he said nothing, only nodding frantically back and forth. I thought I heard him doing that in the night, when I awoke to his body absent from mine. How long had he been doing that? I couldn’t remember.

Being stuck inside had begun to rewrite ourselves, changing the days while we watched, doing nothing.

If no one even knows you’re alive, then who’s to say you’re not already dead?

Damien came back into the room, his hair mussed and his beard patchy. The kettle screamed, and I poured us some tea, the liquid splashing out of the cup as my hands trembled. That nostalgic smell of the tea hit my nose, and my muscles loosened, the tension softening in me. That smell of tea always made me think of the way Damien had brewed it for me throughout our marriage, tenderly placing a hot mug on my nightstand.

I inhaled deeply once more, as if I could calm myself.

I felt a draft hit my neck, suddenly aware of my cardigan leaving my collarbones exposed.

“Where did you put my scarf?” I murmured. Damien shrugged and took his tea, not meeting my eyes.

“I think I forgot it.”

“I asked you for it, like, a million times. Of course, you still forgot it.” I hissed.

He said nothing.

We went to bed early again, with nothing else to do. We had two logs left after the day.

We awoke to the storm having somehow worsened. The thirteenth day. Cold spasms wrecked my body, leaving me weak and numb. A gaping hole was where my stomach should be. The temperature dropped low enough that even with a fire, the air inside the cabin began to feel sharp and painful to inhale.

But Damien wanted to go outside, to see if perhaps the road had finally been plowed. I told him he was an idiot for daring to step outside, the wind howling, the snow not having ceased. He’d get lost.

“You’re just afraid,” he chided, one hand impatiently planted on the knob of the door. I glared at him and felt the urge to scream at his immaturity, but, in complete silence, I put on my gloves, two more pairs of pants, another coat, and followed.

The snow was so heavy the cabin vanished behind us. The wind howled, tearing at our skin. Damien grabbed my wrist to keep up. Snow rose to my hips; I felt like I was drowning in ice.

Every inconvenience became a test, every disagreement bent to his impatience. Before we left, he was passive, dismissive, arrogant. He stopped trying, so did I. I swallowed my words like poison.

With each step, the cold biting at my face, I remembered the compromises, the betrayals—some quiet, some loud. I’d begun to hate him, and he hated me. He pushed, I gave in. I waited for something, anything.

But more than I hated him, I hated myself for staying.

I told myself to focus on survival, and he did too. But the anger in us kept building, bubbling, boiling. I began to feel my heart hammering in my chest, my teeth clenched tightly, my eyes watering from the bitter cold.

Then it slipped out.

“I’m afraid of being stuck here with you,” I shouted over the wind. He stopped and turned, smirking in an inhuman way.

Then, he laughed. A short and cold laugh. “That’s convenient.”

By the tree line, we stopped. His face was red and raw, his eyes bright with something akin to relief, mixed with fear and anguish.

“I stayed. I always do.”

“I never asked you to,” I snapped. My words cracked against the wind like a gunshot. The truth of it shocked both of us. I inhaled and coughed at the cold in my lungs.

More words poured out of us after that. Fast, ugly, unfiltered. Regrets and resentments. Small betrayals that had only hardened into a thick layer of ice over the years. He told me he often wondered what leaving would be like. I told him I learned to measure my life in what I didn’t say. He told me he was tempted to have an affair. I told him that I wouldn't have cared. I told him I had outlived the version of me that felt like loving him.

“You’re not a good person, Jess.”

“Oh, and you are?” I cackled.

“No, we’re too alike for that.”

For a moment, just a breath, we stood there, in the white roaring of the storm, and I saw the thought pass between us. The thought that one of us could easily disappear out here, and the other would survive.

The thought didn’t scare me; my lack of fear behind it did.

The storm raged on, howling, threatening to throw me under the snow. My hands had gone completely numb. Yet Damien grabbed my arm hard enough to hurt. I yanked free and pushed him into the snow. He stared back at me, breathing ragged clouds into the air, snowflakes falling into our hair and eyelashes. Then, without another word, without a decision, we turned back.

We stumbled inside the cabin, panting, our lungs aching from the cold. We hurriedly stripped off our wet clothes, our coats covered in snow, and all of our strength poured out in front of the fire.

There was no apology. No forgiveness. Just bodies seeking heat, skin against skin. Practical and wordless. We slept like that the whole night, tangled and exposed. The fire burned low between us, and I slept deeper than ever.

The storm ended in the night.

Our bodies still naked, I pulled one of the blankets over my shoulders and walked to the window. It smelled of smoke and sweat. The snow was virgin and white as if nothing had happened. The sun was shining, illuminating the snow and blinding me. It was… warm through the glass. The icicles on the trees dripped slowly. It must have been midday.

I turned, only to find Damien already staring. His mouth is thin, and his face so unreadable.

We survived.

We survived each other, I thought.

We had moved through each other like animals in a cage, restless and silent, waiting for a moment to attack. There were moments when the warmth between us felt thin and brittle like the fire, and I realized we had grown apart in ways we didn’t even notice, not until our teeth were bared, skin exposed, waiting for one of us to tear each other apart. ​

The storm took nothing visible from us, but that was the cruelest part. We would leave carrying things we couldn’t name, parts of ourselves exposed only by cold, hunger, and fear. Simply desperate to live.

And somewhere between the blinding light and the silence, I realized the storm hadn’t been the real danger.

It only removed the walls.