Cold Quiet Country Read Free

the corduroy. My skin is numb. My lungs burn. Ahead, a gray house sits at the lake edge, framed in the dusky storm. I’m in the middle of the lake and everything is flat to where trees border in the distance, and looking from my bloody boot to the far-off swirl of snow and trees gives me vertigo.
    I turn. No one on my trail. Yet.
    There’s no way this ends good.
    It’s been less than an hour since Guinevere was in my arms. Struggling, maybe. Eyes wide. There is something strange and fascinating about her hearing music when people are about to die. What she called the bullfrog notes. She heard the song for both of her grandparents years ago, and once for a man about to suffer a heart attack at the grocery.
    While we fondled in the loft, did she hear music for me?
    Is that why?
    Each step is agony. My tracks are clean. The bleeding stopped when my blood became ice, but inside the muscles are chopped. The house draws near, as if it approaches me.
    The house.
    Falling snow obscures a drifted slope at the lake’s edge. The wind has sheathed its fangs; snow falls straight down, like rain. I press my arm to my stomach and there’s frozen blood there, too. I blow my nose without plugging either side. Six hours ago I was inside her and warm and smelling her sweet breath and hair. Hearing telltale giggles. Too-loud giggles.
    I near the bank and look things over. An inlet feeds from a draw in the woods off to the left; the streambed is evident under the drifts. The ice is thin at the edge. The first indication is a cracking sound and then there’s a decrease in the ice’s rigidity. Ten feet from the bank, I shatter through, slash forward, run on a sheet that plunges and slips, and I’m submerged and gagging…
    It doesn’t feel bad. The cold shock imposes a comfortable void between my thoughts and me. My leg doesn’t hurt, though I’m walking on the lake bottom, chin barely above water, eyes peeled back and dancing freaked-out crazy-cold and maybe I’ll stay. How long would it take to end? Two minutes? Thirty seconds? But I never stop moving. I rake snow and icicles, claw out on the bank, and the air is warm.
    The two-story house looms, looking like thirty-year-old bird shit and absolutely still. The windows are dark. The chimney is a monument of cold stones.
    I fight up the bank. Climb the steps. Hear my teeth chatter, but don’t feel them. The door is locked and the knob sticks to my hand. I jerk away and leave a film of skin frozen to the brass. There’s a rock on the porch, a doorstop. I cradle it between my palms and heave it through a window.
    The glass is jagged. I push the doormat with my boot until it folds and then lift it, mash it against the standing shards. I duck through belly down, slip to the floor and huddle. Crawl as if drawing deeper into a cave. Darkness resolves into a fireplace, chairs, a sofa. The smell is damp ashes. I’m about to freeze to death.
    If I get warm, the bleeding in my leg will resume. If I bandage my wound and survive the morning, men with guns will descend on this house.
    I spot a box of matches on the hearth and slide the sleeve open. Matchsticks tumble in a pile. With inflexible fingers, I scrape one across the stone. It flares, and others beside it ignite. I cup my hands above. The color on my skin is red like Gwen’s hair and freckles.
    * * *
    I met Gwen in the summer. She had a faraway, shattered look. A quick smile that said she knew more than her age entitled, said her flirting wasn’t a tease but a promise of goods for the taking. I watched the dust at my feet. When you walk everywhere, you see your feet a lot. Hungry and unfed for two days—except what I scrounged from the forests and fields at night—I came upon the Haudesert farm knowing only that I smelled cow dung and saw fields of waist-high corn, and others of alfalfa.
    Guinevere answered the door. Her eyes were startling and her hair was as red as mine. I didn’t try to feel anything toward her, but in that very