The Widower and the Wolf

The cold pricks at the inside of his nostrils, dries out his throat and his lips and leaves him with wet eyelashes when the ice melts by the fireside. The chill slithers beneath layers of clothing, beneath his skin and tissue and muscles and it settles angrily into the very fibres of his bones. This place is barren and distant: the snow goes on for miles and miles for as far as the eye can see. In the daylight, it’s blindingly bright when the sun reflects down on the expanse of white desert. During the nighttime hours, every decibel of sound is absorbed with immediacy.

It’s eerily quiet, and still, he cannot sleep.

Sunlight dissipates early in the day, dips below the far-off horizon and leaves Julian more alone in the world than when he’d been a child of five and his older brother abandoned him at the park he didn’t know how to walk home from. It’d been an argument over who could swing higher that sparked the irresponsible antics. Their mother had arrived at the playground, frantic to retrieve her youngest child, within ten minutes of the event. Until now, Julian had been sure there was no greater sense of loneliness and disorientation than a child feels in those moments.

In the quiet of the nights in the secluded cabin where his wife went to die, he sits awake and listens for the howling of the wolves he knows must be hiding in plain sight outside.

Fire crackles, turning in on itself as the hours pass and it eats away at the surviving logs of wood. Stovetop coffee has gone cold in the ceramic of the stained mug supplied in the cabin, and Julian realises for the first time that this is why his late wife insisted on filling their cups with boiling water before accepting any of the aromatic caffeine. He’d never asked – just shook his head with a smirk that insisted she was the more ridiculous between the two of them.

When the doctors confirmed her diagnosis, her tastebuds handed in their own premature resignation. Emily stopped drinking coffee, saying it turned her stomach. She traded bacon and omelettes in for plain toast until the day she told Julian even that wasn’t worth the energy it took to chew.

They tried smoothies, packed with as many nutrients as he knew how to put in a basket at the grocery store. They switched to meal replacements later on. Eventually, Emily’s lips would quiver around the straw or against the curve of the glass, and she’d struggle to swallow even her own spit. Her body – like the fire before him now – cannibalised whatever was keeping it real and warm and worthy of the name ‘fire’.

“I don’t want to die in front of you,” she’d told him while they sat in matching patio chairs in the sunlight that had killed the garden she couldn’t tend to that summer.

He’d squeezed her hand, gently, and gifted her the manifestation of pain pummelling his chest and his gut and every part of his head that could hold a headache: a very sad smile. The sort that didn’t reach his eyes and may never reach them again. The pad of his thumb had brushed over the back of her alarmingly white hand and he’d said, “It’s okay.”

Neither of them knew at the time how serious she was.

Julian’s body aches now from being awake for too many hours. It aches because he can’t bring himself to lay on the lumpy mattress even when he does succumb to sleep during the day. It aches in a way that makes the wedding band on his left hand feel heavy to the point of exhaustion. Still, he knows, none of this pain is comparable to what she’d felt in her last days.

Above the fireplace hangs an aerial photograph, but it’s difficult to take a first glance and see that it’s the very property he sits on now. In the faded image, the cabin is surrounded by evergreens and signs of life. The foliage stretches out in lines to the edges of the picture, silently insisting that this had once been a place someone must have enjoyed visiting. Julian wonders whether there are tree stumps beneath the snowfield outside, remnants of a time before someone sacrificed the land to the highest bidder.

An unexpected pop! sounds from the coals, startling the widower and sloshing cold coffee onto the denim of his lap with the jostling movement. The furniture shifts against the hardwood. The hardwood, unaccustomed to so much company, creaks an angry noise of protest that trembles through the whole of the structure, and Julian freezes uncomfortably in his seat.

He’s never believed in ghosts.

But there’s something otherworldly about this place so far away and the scenes of horror he’s come to associate it with. His conviction could be swayed.

Julian shuffles to set down the cup, leans forward onto his knees and temporarily makes a home for his head from the palms of his hands. It’s short-lived. There’s an instigating little voice in the back of his mind that insists he turn chin over shoulder and make sure there’s nothing in need of his attention on the bed.

It’s empty—except for the image burned into his memory.

They’d agreed to weekly supply drops. The bags weren’t filled with food so much as they were clean clothes, tea sachets, and pain killers. She’d stopped eating altogether, every passing week revealing more sharp skeletal edges. Keeping their interactions brief was key, because if Julian lingered too long they both knew he wouldn’t leave.

Wind blistered across the open land, seeking structures and species to whip around with vengeance. He arrived on their agreed-upon day with their agreed-upon supplies, pulling the vehicle he’d already begun to think of as his rather than theirs into the singular parking space carved out from the snow. The wooden door of the cabin was ajar, and he knew then there was more amiss than the way the sun seemed to want to cast shadows in all the wrong directions.

Logs of firewood he’d split on his last visit lay haphazardly strewn, dropped by the armful she evidently couldn’t carry. The frame of the door boasted a messy strip of maroon, a colour so unfit for the environment it immediately sent Julian’s stomach into anxious knots.

It’s hard to say whether he rushed inside or took his time on the approach. Time doesn’t act the way it should when a memory is disturbed. Careless crimson paw prints led a trail through the door and into the cabin, revealing a different sort of gravesite from the one he’d been anticipating.

The dog had paced through the pool of blood, tracked it across every square foot of walkable floor. The mattress and the bed had absorbed their own fair share of Emily, cottons and polyester boasting the brightest and most alarming colours in the space.

And Emily—she lay there like something that had never been human to begin with, the remaining flesh torn from her tired bones in scraggly strips. With one leg on the bed and the other reaching out in an angle toward the fireplace, she might’ve fancied herself a contortionist under better circumstances. The wolf hadn’t taken note of her clothing, shredding it to floss his teeth with later. She’d been expressionless, and where her bright eyes should have been in her head all that could be found were empty craters.

Julian’s attention doesn’t linger on the bed for long. The cabin had been thoroughly cleaned, given a new set of sheets and an overpowering scent of chemical lemon. His wife’s body had been salvaged – what remained of it – and packaged neatly into a casket for the funeral. The coroner told him there was no chance of restoration. The damage had been far too extensive.

The chill that lives inside of him while he’s here creeps deeper within, nestling into the innermost corners of his soul and insisting he finally tend to the fire he’s been neglecting. Knees crack in protest, whole body stiff as it slides into a thick, wool-lined jacket. The desolation of the location unsettles him most of all when he finds himself reaching for nonexistent keys to lock the door tight from nonexistent local criminals. Nothing out here is local. Something or someone might have been, once, but they’re long gone.

Without reason to close the door behind him, Julian moves around the side of the cabin, relying entirely on light cast down from a full moon and blanket of stars. It is beautiful, he knows, but hasn’t yet found the energy to admire any of it. He and Emily had been amateur stargazers, years ago. Nights spent laying on the hood of his car on a scratchy blanket play to a soundtrack of made-up constellations when he goes over the memory.

Replaying memories is most of what he’s been doing as of late. There’s a determination so strong it keeps his core tight; a determination not to let the exact cadence of her tone when she spoke slip too far from the realm of reality. How exactly did her voice lift at the end of a question? How quickly did she rush through detailing her feelings when they made her nervous? For now, he knows the answers precisely.

But he’s been warned it won’t last forever.

With a bundle of small logs piled onto one arm, Julian tracks back through his own large footsteps. The light casting from inside the cabin illuminates the cloud of breath that assaults the night air on exhale. His toe nudges the door open further and he has to remind himself that there will be no significant warmth to engulf his body.

Feet cross the threshold, and Julian finds that the tone of the single room has changed. Instead of the image of Emily lifeless on the bed to demand his attention, the cabin has found new company. Julian drops the armful of wood, unhesitating in his rush toward a chef’s knife that’d been left out in the open on the small countertop. The flurry of motion startles the wolf, makes him question the decision to invite himself inside once again. It bounds off the bed in a great leap that covers most of the space between the their two mismatched bodies.

It growls and snarls. It bares its teeth and strikes for the soft, easy flesh of Julian’s calf. He doesn’t yet have a proper handle on the weapon, so instead he kicks at the creature and sends it backward only a few feet. It’s not enough space between them, but they both know the wolf can’t be as hungry as he’s pretending to be. He’s eaten well, and recently enough. He feasted on everything Julian needed to be happy. The grieving husband gets a good grip on the knife and angles it properly and directly toward his adversary.

Somehow, the animal knows that this is a standoff and that the man he’s preying on can be dangerous with the right help. It does not strike at the sharp metal. It’s growling seems to carry hesitation now.

And this is what Julian had come here for: one life as retribution for another lost. But in the moment while his hand is wavering under the weight of the knife, he realises it’s a reaction as carnal as the feast in the cabin had been. It won’t bring Emily back to life. It will not make the grief any more palatable or easier to swallow in its barbed-wire difficulty. Julian’s hand wavers, tendons quivering until the blade drops from his fist and clambers across the floorboards.

The wolf, too, knows of love and of loss, so it leaves quietly with its head hanging low. In its calm departure from the fight, it’s difficult for Julian to see it as more predator than pet.

He wonders if Emily called on the animal to put an end to her suffering.

Perhaps the wolf did what the man could not manage.