The feeling doesn't come.
4
MAYA
A week in and I'm still here.
That has got to count for something.
The cabin is still cold in the mornings and the internet drops when the wind comes from the north and the indoor wood pile needs restocking every day, which I did not account for. But the routines are holding. Routines are good. They keep my mind from wondering.
March arrived with blue skies so sharp they hurt to look at.
The work is going well enough.
I have three open commissions on the tablet. Two for a small publisher in Portland who found me through my pseudonym and communicates entirely by email, which suits me. One for an independent author who writes picture books about animals that explain hard things to children. Loss. Change. The particular fear of what comes next.
I used to do this work in person, in a classroom with seventeen kindergarteners and paint-stained fingers and songs I made up on the spot. Now I do it alone, on a screen, under a name thatisn't mine. The work is quieter. It pays less. But, I am better at it than I expected. And the children still get the stories, even if they'll never know who drew them.
The colors on screen today are deep blue-greens of a forest at dusk. A fox kit at the mouth of its den, looking out at a world it hasn't entered yet. One paw forward. Not committed.
Going to town the first time took two days of talking myself into it. Beanie pulled low, scarf covering most of my face, which in Montana in early March reads as sensible rather than suspicious. Hardware store for the tarp and rope. General store for supplies.
Nobody looked at me twice. I walked the three blocks of Briarhaven's main street and nothing happened. No second glances, no recognition, no phones angled in my direction. Just a small town going about its Tuesday.
I came back to the cabin and sat in the kitchen and something in my chest loosened half a turn, like a bolt that's been overtightened for months. Not hope. I'm not ready for that word. Just the absence of the specific dread that has followed me since Los Angeles, and the absence of dread, it turns out, feels like an entire season changing.
And then I remember the parcel that was on the doorstep four mornings ago.
I stood in the doorway longer than I should have before I touched it, the cold coming through my socks, the morning light flat and unhelpful on the brown paper surface. Nothing about it told me anything. That's what made it worse. I've learned to read threat from very small signals, and a package with no markings on a doorstep in a place nobody is supposed to know I exist is not a small signal. I stood there until the cold became the more pressing problem, and then I picked it up.
Inside: a base layer set, mid-layer fleece, waterproof shell pants, a coat that weighed more than anything I'd worn before. Sturdy boots.
My size, exactly, which meant someone had looked at me more carefully than I'd registered being looked at. I stood with that information for a moment before the rest of it assembled itself.
And a note.
Your gear is an insult.
I read it twice.
The handwriting I didn't recognize, but the register was unmistakable. That specific brand of blunt and smugness.
Jace.
Something warm tried to surface. I let it get halfway.
The smile lasted four seconds. Four seconds longer than I planned for, and I was alone in the kitchen, which is the only reason I'm not more annoyed about it.
The boots grip where my old ones slipped. The coat keeps me warm in a way the previous one didn’t. Jace was not wrong about the quality. I wear both every day because frostbite doesn't care about my principles.
What I haven't done is say thank you. Saying thank you is contact. Contact is a thread between me and another person, and threads can be followed, and I have recent and thorough evidence of what happens when someone follows a thread back to where I am.
The work is done for today, so I close my laptop. My back has opinions about the kitchen chair I've been using as a desk chair for six hours. I stand, roll my shoulders, look at the window.
Light still good. Forty minutes before it drops below the tree line and takes the temperature with it.
The water stain above the kitchen has expanded two centimeters since I arrived. I found the problem section from the ground the first week: flashing pulled away from the ridge, thegap visible from below. Rain or snowmelt comes through, tracks across the ceiling, pools above the kitchen. It will get worse. The tarp has been sitting rolled under the table since I bought it. The rope coiled beside it. I've been looking at both for days, working out the approach. It will be simple enough as long as I can get up there.
