Whispers from the Icebound Cabin
The tundra stretched flat as a sheet of glass, the moon resting pale and patient above it all. I wandered where the wind forgot to leave, chasing a rumor of warmth, until the silhouette of a cabin rose from the drift like a secret confessed to the night. Its walls were all frost and memory, windows glazed over with the breath of ages, and the door hung on a single, stubborn hinge as if pleading to be chosen or rejected.
Inside, the air was a dare. The floor creaked with the courage of old winters, and the stove coughed ash and promises. A single bed lay under a quilt stitched with scenes of storms, and the map on the wall bore pinholes that glittered with frost, markings that I swore moved when I blinked. I drew closer to the stove, warming my hands, listening to the room settle around me as if the cabin was taking a gentle breath after years of silence.
When night closed its heavy curtain, the whispers began—not from the wind, but from the walls themselves, speaking in the thin, careful voice of remembered frost. The first came as a sigh near the hearth, a rustle of coal and memory.
“You found a shelter that does not forget your footsteps. Be careful what you leave behind.”
I told myself it was the wind, a trick of distance, until the whispers sharpened into names I had never spoken aloud and yet recognized as prayers, confessions, and warnings all at once.
- Footsteps that appeared in the frost on the floor, then vanished when I turned to look.
- A carved face on the doorframe, eyes that followed me with patient sorrow.
- A clock that ticked backward, each tock thawing a memory I did not know I kept hidden.
From the corner of the room, a light bloomed—soft, cold, and blank as a winter moon. It revealed a journal, its pages brittle with age, ink faded to a pale blue. I opened it to find entries written in a hand that mirrored mine, as though someone had copied my steps long after the runner I am had left the track. “Do not stay,” one page warned, “for the cabin keeps what you fail to release.” Yet another line confessed a different truth: the cabin does not imprison you so much as invite you to become part of its collection—memories compressed into ice and silence.
And then I heard it again—the soft, inexorable lullaby of the ice. The ceiling hummed with a voice I could not see, a chorus of frost that promised warmth only for a heartbeat before stealing it away. I wrapped my coat tighter, listened, and realized that to leave was no longer a choice. The cabin had become a guardian, a keeper of thresholds, and as I wrote my name into the margins of the journal, the last line appeared without my consent: a name that was mine, only longer, colder, and sure to endure long after I forgot how to speak.