The Christmas Cabin

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. The number of years it had been unvisited were exactly thirty as of this year, Molly thought to herself. Her family had not returned to their vacation home after the accident on Christmas night. Molly only vaguely remembered the details through her then seven year old lens. She struggled to close the back hatch on the SUV, her arms full of grocery bags. The flood light finally kicked on after some weaving to and fro in front of the steps. She gasped, taking in the full view of how much of a toll time had taken on the place. “Blow that candle out Trent! You’re going to burn the place down,” she shouted playfully to her husband who was already inside. “I don’t think I’m getting as much as we thought for this place,” Molly expressed with a half-hearted sigh as she entered. Trent nodded in agreement and inquired about turning on the fuse box. She pointed to the basement and got to work unpacking some of the dry goods by flashlight. Molly had recently been burdened with having to sell the cabin and the several acres of land it came with in lieu of her father’s passing and was visiting to take some pictures for the realtor.

Trent returned from the basement and the lights flickered on, illuminating the cabin exactly how she remembered it, exactly how they had left it. Her stomach dropped as she honed in on the little details of disarray left around her. A haphazardly placed cocoa mug still teetered on the edge of the coffee table, the contents long since evaporated. A garbage bag spilling over with wadded up gift wrap left by the tree. The old turntable her mother would play her records on was covered under a thick layer of dust. She approached the stand and blew at the dust, then covered her nose and mouth with her sweater. She twisted the dial and it began to crackle and spin. She glanced over at Trent, widening her eyes as if to say, “it still works!” She dropped the needle down and it began to play Patsy Cline, filling the cabin with an eerie nostalgia. She closed her eyes and was transported back in time to that last Christmas. It smelled of popcorn and pine and she could hear the gentle popping from the fireplace. She remembered her father putting her little feet on top of his and dancing around the living room, and him turning the volume nearly all the way up to cover up the sound of her mother’s screams.

Molly’s mother had suffered from bipolar disorder for most of her adult life and would sometimes struggle from what she now understood were psychotic episodes. From little Molly’s perspective, her mother was just sometimes quiet and sad and would spend days in bed. Or by contrast, would take her on a 3am impromptu road trip and smile too long at handsome strangers in grocery stores. On the last Christmas, her mother was especially suffering from a severe depressive episode but they decided to go to the cabin anyway. Her mother spent most of the week in her bedroom crying and screaming out. Her father would bring her mother food and check up on her, but she would say awful things to him while throwing things around the room. Molly would try to go in to see her mother but he would tell her not to enter because he didn’t want Molly to see her like that, not until she was back to “her right mind.” On Christmas morning, Molly opened presents with her father and he tried to make it as normal for her as he possibly could, but her mother wouldn’t join them and stayed in her room. Later that day her mother was clawing at the door of the bedroom while crying. She asked her father if Mommy was playing cats in there like they sometimes did, crawling around on all fours meowing and lapping up water from a bowl. Her father assured her that she didn’t want any company and that she was just very sick right now. Later that night her mother finally left the bedroom and went for a walk outside barefoot in a snowstorm. She ended up falling over a small ledge and tumbled down into a shallow creek. By the time Molly’s father found her and got an ambulance to her, she had broken her back in several places, had a severe concussion, and ended up losing fingers to frostbite. She was never able to speak or walk again. She survived three years after the accident, a living corpse tucked away in a bed.

Molly opened her eyes and came back to her current reality, even more off put than she was before. Trent sat down on the couch and began scrolling through his phone, complaining of a headache. She glanced over his shoulder, seeing what he was doing. She had caught him talking to other women recently, much younger women than her. She was deeply saddened by the betrayal but had decided not to confront him about it. He had also come home very late a few nights in a row and she was becoming increasingly suspicious. “I’m going to go put the sheets on the bed,” she yelled back to Trent while walking down the hallway. She tried opening the master bedroom door, but it had swelled with age and she had to put her hip into it. She noticed a latch on the outside as she swung it open, a padlock hanging from the hook. As she entered the room she could almost hear the faint screams from her mother and a chill ran through her body. She flipped the light on and looked around the room in horror. The sheets were half off the bed, smeared with blood stains, as were four ropes tied around each bed post. The night stand and end table were turned over and one of her father’s belts laid on the floor, the end slipped through the buckle. As she turned to run out of the room, she saw the scratches on the back of the bedroom door and a shriveled up fingernail by the threshold. Written in blood on the wall read, “I don’t love you anymore” in her mother’s delicate handwriting.

She began to remember back to earlier in December of that year, when her mother had introduced her to a friend from work. A tall man with a warm smile and blonde beard. They went to see a movie together and her mother told Molly not to tell her father because he wanted to see the movie himself and would be disappointed that they had gone without him. After the movie her mother had asked her how she liked the man. The realization settled into Molly as she stepped over a small pair of gardening shears on the bedroom floor, a skeletal finger with a gold band around it laying beside. She bent down and collected the ring up into her palm, turning it over and over with her thumb, remembering the significance of the vows she herself had taken. She exited the room with a cold numbness, the kind her father must have felt towards the sight of his wife's adulterous limp body laying in the cold stream. Molly walked back out to the living room and picked up the semi-conscious Trent’s phone from the coffee table and threw it at his chest. He did not guard himself from the blow as his hands and legs were tied to the slots in the wood of the couch. She stared at him with a callous disregard while she poured gasoline from a small mason jar out of the grocery bag methodically around the room. She knocked the burning candle out of the window sill and walked out of the cabin, slamming the door shut behind her.