Jagged white flakes tumble to the earth, collect on the wood piled beneath the cabin’s frosted window. Fuel for the only remaining source of heat since the power went out.
Carmen extricates her grip from the back of the puke green couch and faces the spacious living room. A circular rug spans between her, a matching recliner, a stone hearth, and oak shelves displaying antique cookbooks and a tiny wooden train.
Viola returns from one of two other rooms, a sweet fragrance mingling with that of charred timber. Her arms are loaded with two mugs, a hotpad, and a reusable grocery bag. Light blares from the phone tucked under her chin, its only useful function this far from civilization.
“I found cocoa. It's peppermint, your favorite.”
No, it's yours, treats should never taste like toothpaste. Carmen swallows the retort, dropping to the floor. "Great."
Viola fishes the cast-iron kettle from the coals, her ruby pendant taunting the flames. As she fills the cups, steam flows over the lip, billows up, catching her hand. She seethes a breath between her teeth.
Carmen takes her cup, clicking her new manicure against the flowery porcelain. "What kind of ninety year old woman lives this far out, has backup cocoa but not a generator?"
"I think it's sweet." Viola shrugs. "Kinda reminds me of my gran, but less racist."
Carmen never met the woman who agreed to pay a complete stranger to housesit. But when she told Viola it was a bad idea to go alone, even to help a sweet old lady, Viola suggested she come along. Carmen should have refused.
"Cheer up, she'll be back to take us down the mountain in the morning, and," Viola rummages in the sack, then with a flurrish present two bags of marshmallows. "Your choice of small colored or large?"
Carmen points to the lump of pastels.
"Great choice, then we can do smores too!"
Carmen's stomach gurgles and she takes a pensive sip of cocoa. Minty lava scalds the tip of her tongue. "Is there anything more substantial?"
Viola peeks the bag open. "There's chocolate pretzels."
Carmen runs a hand over her face. Did the old woman possess any teeth. With a weighted sigh she accepts them. For a time the only sounds are those of sweets being consumed and wind battering the tiny cabin.
Then a rumble sounds out front, accompanied by a piercing whine. A bit like an angry engine.
Carmen scrambles for the sofa. She stares into the uncanny brightness of a snowy night, breath clouding the glass. But there's nothing in the driveway. The sound cuts off.
In the space of a blink the shadow from the base of one tree leaps out across the expanse of white and into the next. A breath snags in Carmen's throat, her stomach twisting into painful knots.
"Did you see that!" Carmen doesn't take her gaze from the tree's base. "That shadow, it moved."
"Maybe it was a raccoon jumping between branches," Viola says, a tremor to her voice.
It's no doubt cold enough to drive any sane creature to its burrow, even if raccoons did jump like that but Carmen nods.
Viola turns back to the fire, using her mug-free hand to coax another log attop the flames. "Ah crap."
Carmen's gaze snaps to her friend. "What?"
"We're down to two logs." Viola shifts the contents of the tinderbox and her brow slumps. "Make that one and a handful of sticks."
A chill crawls down Carmen's spine, she could have sworn the box was full a minute ago. "We could just go to bed?"
"Come on, it's only," there's a sharp click and light blares from Viola's phone, "like seven and we don't need power to have fun."
Carmen's face scrunches. "Doing what, freezing?"
Viola casts her eyes skyward. "There's more wood right outside the door."
Carmen's chest constricts, she glances back out the window.
Viola's lips twist. "Want to..."
A sharp scraping rents the air, burrows into Carmen’s skull. She smashes her palms against her ears, though the sound is gone. Time stretches out into an amorphous thing, that could be a moment or an eternity. At some point Carmen’s lungs begin to function again.
Viola drags on her coat, fo-fur tufted around its hood and sleeves.
“You aren’t seriously going out there!”
“We need more firewood and I’d like to know what that was. But we’ll never find out cowering in here,” Viola says, a slight tremor behind her harsh words. “If a tree fell on the roof we may need to do something to keep snow from getting in.”
That didn’t sound like a tree falling, but having never heard one, Carmen’s argument flounders and dies on her tongue.
Viola flicks her phone light on. “Be back in a minute.”
There’s a rush of cold, upending every follicle on Carmen’s being, and the door snaps shut behind Viola. Snow crunches, wind howling between the trees, in the hollows of the house. Then nothing, not so much as the whisper of a falling leaf. A reek, like decay steeped in gingerbread, seeps through the cabin’s cracks.
Dark rain blotches the snow, forming great crimson patches. Not rain, blood. Sound returns. With a wet plink a mangled hand lands atop the wood pile. Carmen clutches her mouth, backing from the window.
“Viola,” the word come out a strangled question.
The door rattles. Carmen glances around, pulse thundering in her ears. Her gaze falls on the poker and she snatches it up. The knob turns. She tightens her grip. Smokey claws wrap the door frame. They grow denser, lightening, into wrinkled human fingers. The door swings wide and in walks a stooped woman with gray wisps of hair. Carmen’s shoulders slump, blood returning to her fingers. The old woman tilts her head at Carmen and grins, revealing jagged teeth dripping scarlet. And resting on her age-spotted chest is Viola’s ruby pendant.
Carmen sucks in a breath. Smoke coils from the old lady, her body becoming less solid. The poker rattles in Carmen’s grasps. Sound blinks out and darkness envelops her.
Fog blurs the tops of the palms, the peeling bus stop sign, swallows all beyond the deserted terminal.
Meira adjusts her pack straps and glances back at the readout: next stop, 7:30 pm.
Only an hour away. She could wait that long, take the next bus back to civilization. But then where would she go?
She has a fifty in her pocket. Cashed from her final paycheck on her way out of LA. Not enough for a single night in a roach-hotel. Forget breakfast the next morning.
No there's only this. The empty plot of land her Gran left. The rest of her fortune sunk into some trust that takes care of the taxes and insures it stays in the family. Meira would rather have the money about now.
She passes a cafe with a hand-writen 'now hiring' sign yellowing beneath the darkened 'open' light. Her stomach whines, the fifty a pathetic lump of crumpled paper to its veracity. That's tomorrow's problem. Tomorrow's staring at a blank application while the words 'employment history' glare back, daring her to put the job she dedicated ten years and the better part of her twenties to.
Until the day Mr. Hansen found her drinking a beer between shifts. He'd shouted for thirty minutes about how it's people like her that are ruining family businesses. Nevermind that her recipes were a staple of the menu, that some customers only came on days she worked. He'd fired her on the spot, and insured every prospective employer thereafter knew just how horrible he thought her.
Beyond the parking lot with one lone car tucked beside the dumpster, the little town gives way to shrouded wilds.
Moisture clinging to every hair, prickling Meira's flesh. Her sneakers sink into the sand, granules spilling over the edge, working into her socks and making a home there.
She slows. A half formed notion to dump them condensing at the edge of her mind, when the bush beside her gives a violet, snapping shudder.
She hauls back, pulse roaring in her ears, bracing against whatever horrors await. But nothing comes. Probably just a rabbit or stray cat.
She gulps down air, tucks her scarf closer and hurries on.
The camping gear she borrowed from Ryan, weighing heavier with each step. He never ventures far from the comforts of his uncle's renovated basement, so it will be months before he notices.
The path scuttles beneath a slatted fence. Meira pulls up maps on her phone and sure enough, her dot is within the property line. Returning it to her pocket, she swings herself over the fence, landing with a muffled thump.
Ahead the undergrowth looks sparse enough for a twelve person tent, so it might fit her double sleeper.
Mist clings to the spaces between, blotting out any hint, aside from the salt scented air, that the ocean is close at hand. She drags a strap to the edge of her shoulder as the brush opens up.
Then the wind gusts, pulling back layers of white. To reveal narrow beams, cradling a house in ghostly tendrils above the slithering tide.
Her heartbeat flutters, a prickle scuttling up her arms. Gran never mentioned a house and there were no structures named on the deed. How was it possible to keep an entire building secret?
A narrow staircase rises to meet the wraparound porch, bound in swooping wrought iron.
Meira glaces back at the uninterrupted patch of sand. It will be comfortable enough. Though not as much as a bed, even a moldy moth-eaten one.
She shrugs her pack strap in place and looks up to find the mist has once again obscured the house. Like it was never there.
What was?
The house, she just saw. She must be more tired than she thought.
Meira shakes out her head and truges forward. Twisted railing sifts out of the fog, not more than five feet ahead, its edges out of focus. The stairs, brown with rust, except for the wash of salt, only follow when her foot comes to rest upon them. Ground falls away Her biting grip the only surety she’s not about to tumble into the abyss.
At last her sneakers hit with the hollow clunk of wood. She raises her gaze and the breath lodges in her throat.
The view is crystalline. The deck, the light gray slatted cottage trimmed in navy, its planter boxes overflowing with silver flowers, even the distant ocean dotted with sailboats.
Meira blinks hard, leans over the railing. Directly below is swirling white, a cloudy sky inverted. She backs away, her chest raw, and fixes her attention on the house.
A prickle of recognition teases the threads of her subconscious as she steps before the blue door, turns the dark brushed metal knob and flings it wide.
The scent of baking cookies and cocoa ride the expelled current.
She hovers a foot across the threshold. "Hello. Anyone here."
A muted half duplication is the only answer.
Legally the house is hers now. Not that the thought does much to stifle the feeling that someone else has already made themselves at home.
The marble counters gleam. Not a speck of grime adorns the stainless stove or chestnut cabinets. A long table is set with glass and silverware on lace embroidered placemats. And at its center, a bowl, piled with fruit, fat grapes, ruby apples, bananas at their one day of peak ripeness.
As Gran's had always been. No matter how Meira had gorged herself, there was always a bunch of grapes to pluck on her way out to play. On a table just like this, in a kitchen with this same layout.
Her throat tightens, hands clamped beneath her ribs. Tucked beside the fridge is the very stool she knelt on to help Gran knead dough, dust flower out for sugar cookies, and inevitably, all over herself. With a blackened hole from where Meira once leaned a poker on it, the contours of its legs severed from when she'd grown too tall for it but not enough to reach the cabinets.
Her eyes prickle. Could that have been this place, layered over by a different canvas.
A dream house, memories folded into rooms that bear no resemblance but are somehow these rooms.
Meira dashes to the pantry, hesitates for the briefest moment before wrenching it open. Her chest swells. It's bursting with food. She runs her finger over containers of flour, five different sugars, jars of candied nuts...
Ingredients for all the recipes Gran taught her. Her stomach squeals its assent. But what to make first.
It comes at once. Her favorite, the one recipe she could never quite recall the proportions for. Or didn't want to remember, one thing she could keep as her own, when she gave everything to Mr. Hansen's bakery.
But as she reaches to pluck a box of bakers chocolate from a high shelf, something brushes past her finger. All her breath vacates her lungs in strangled yelp. She lunges back clutching the offended hand, dragging in wisps of air.
Around the edge of the box pokes a minute, angular face, curtained by silver hair.
Meira stares with plucked eyes at the creature. Two sets of feathered antennae wave back.
Then it's gone. Had she blinked? More likely imagined it. She gathers herself, forces her hands open, squares her shoulders and returns to gathering ingredients. Each time her memory falters on what else is needed, a syrup seems to glow, or a toothpick box shuffles in her peripherals.
Arms load and nerves jagged, she returns to the kitchen and sets about finding utensils, until all that remains are measuring spoons.
Meira peeks in on a stack of pans, finds four sizes of plates, scours a cabinet with every other measuring element. She opens the drawer beneath the coffee maker, slams it shut and, hands trembling, opens it once more, to a little humanoid with twig-limbs and iridescent wings dancing between silverware slats. They peer up at her, a wicked smile curving their lipless face. Then, from a space that should not have concealed anything, they produce a set of measuring spoons as big as them, hold it out with an almost sheepish expression.
Meira tilts her head, takes it with deft fingers. The creature bows, makes a closing motion and, as she rolls the draw inward, returns to dancing.
She stares at the drawer-face, trails a hand through her hair. This can't be. Yet, an ache that a memory is close to being recalled, skims the borders of her mind.
She tightens her grip, the spoons biting into her palm.
Oh, yeah, food. Puzzles are better on a full stomach anyways.
With all her tools in arms reach, she begins. Dry ingredients first, as Gran instructed. Whip the butter and sugar till smooth, but make extra cause it's the fairies favorite part. Her hand stills, the mixer whirring in place. Meira had always loved to scoop finger-fulls of it whenever Gran's back was turned. That must have been what she'd meant.
Meira finishes mixing and opens the fridge. Her chest hollows. Milk won't, by any stretch, still be good. She spins off the cap, takes a tentative sniff. Doesn't gag. She inhales a lungful. It smells like… milk?
Of all the ridiculous things. She hovers a measuring cup over the bowl. Now empty save for narrow rows of yellow, the kind of tracks left by digging fingers.
She lets the cup fall to the counter. Where, around the edge of the flour container rest a pair of little legs that look to have been carved from sticks, one knee crooked up.
Snapping her mouth back together, she begins again.
When granules give way to silky peeks, she has gained an audience. The creature's chin resting atop a salt shaker, solid black eyes trained on her.
She's either gone off the deep end or there's a fairy in this kitchen. Whichever is the case, hunger tears at her insides.
With each completed step another appears, cross-legged on the egg carton, poking from the paper towel roll, stretched over the butter dish.
By the time she pulls the tray from the oven, loaded with raspberry croissants drizzled in vanilla bean glaze, nine fairies adorn the kitchen. One less than plates set at the table.
Each face now familiar. From the countless times she played hide and seek in the cupboards with those three, that one who helped with her math homework on weekends, these two that would sneak cookies to her room in the middle of the night when she woke from a bad dream.
They leap to the table, stand before the plates, most barely able to see over the rim. A smile erupts on Meir's lips as she distributes the food.
When every last crumb is scraped from the plates and cocoa is drained from glasses, a high melodious hum drifts on the air. Other notes join in as the fairies rise, balancing plates on heads, tossing cups in a line to the sink sparkling with bubbles.
Plans take shape as memories trickle back, of bouncing in Gran's wake, on her way to the café down the road to sell her treats. Meira sighs, heart as full as her belly. Tomorrow she will begin preparations.