The Weight of a Cold Feeling

Outside, the wind howled and moaned, temporarily distracting me from the burning anger I felt.

Inside this dollhouse cabin, the only sound was the ticking metronome near the moose head

against the wall. It was failing horribly at trying to interrupt my thoughts.

He lied. The words echoed loudly in my head. He just stood there, the smoke wisping from the

shotgun he still had in his hands. The crimson blemish on the powdered snow lay there, its blood

still fresh and its body still. A cardinal. Her cardinal.

He’d sworn up and down, over and over again. Just this past spring, the wind whipping through

my hair and the smell of fresh lilies in the air, he’d ruffled my hair, and promised me.

“You don’t have to worry, Kira. We’re set. We don’t have to… kill anymore.”

Yet the smiles he’d offered were show displays. The “harvests” had been stocked away for a long

time.

Now he looked me in the eye, my momma’s eyes, and lied. Said he didn’t want to worry me.

Except watching him stand over the lifeless bird, the vibrant feathers fading with the cold, was a

deeper kind of terror.

Momma loved cardinals. Their bright bursts of color against the stark white of the Alaska skies

had always brought a warm smile to her face, a glow in her eye. After… after the ice pond took

her, they still came, perching on our front porch and serving as my wakeup calls.

And now one of them’s gone. By his hand. The same hands that used to knead dough as the base

for Mom’s pumpkin pies, that taught me how to shoot a bow and arrow, that helped me out of

the ice pond before I drowned, that held mine tight when the nightmares came.

He didn’t say a word. His eyes, usually a glowing sapphire, were clouded over, mirroring the

bleak slate sky. I saw it then, a slight flicker – that’s where I saw it, the raw, searing pain. He

knew. He knew what that bird meant and he knew what he’d done.

But knowing hadn’t stopped him. The cardinal dropping out of the sky, its body thudding against

the snowbed, its blood soaking the pearly white snow was permanently seared into my eyelids. It

wasn’t just a bird. It was a broken promise, the lie that tasted like acid in my mouth. Another

piece of Mom gone.

I’m not sure I could ever look at him again without seeing that smoking gunfire. The lifelessness

of a cherished bird before us. I’m not sure I could ever hear his voice again without the lie

behind it. Our silence stretched, long and unwavering. The wind howled louder, and inside, a

different kind of storm started to fester.