Under the Ashes

The two men arrived the same morning the world froze.

She let them into her cabin, but ignored the way their cold bones leaned towards her fire. “Why are you here?” She already knew—the leader of their madness had turned tail, leaving them to feed on old lies and new mountains of snow—but she wanted to make sure that they knew it too.

The younger man tried to hold her gaze and failed. “We’ve no place to go,” he said. “And we’re hungry. I don’t know these lands. And the storm’s… Please, ma’am, you don’t have to help me. But my grandfather, he’s… he’s unwell.”

She watched the old man. They had been neighbors since before the cancer took her grandmother. She had never learned his first name. But the blue chilling his stare was burned into her memory’s eye on the night he paid two kids to set fire to her grandmother’s garden. She could still taste the smoke, hear the screams ripping out of her throat, feel heat biting into the skin of her hands. Anger still twisted in her gut, but she wasn’t a heartless beast. “I don’t have much—”

“What did I tell you?” the old man said to his grandson. “This kind of people—”

She continued talking as if his spew hadn’t envenomed the air. “But I have enough to get us through winter. If we are careful.” 

“Just tell me what to do,” the young man said to her. “I’m strong. I know how to listen.”

Lips pursed, the old man walked to stand by her fire. 

She let him. But when she saw him eying her grandmother’s iron rocking chair—the only thing that had survived the burning of the garden—she said, “No. You sit on the floor. Or you can walk outside to find a spot that suits you. There is plenty of room under the snow, under the ashes.”

 

photo by Craig Tidball - on Unsplash

for Poets and Storytellers United (Writers’ Pantry #5: A Tiny Light at the End of the Plastic Tunnel)