"Alaska's Secret" by M.D. Smith IV
Short fiction
Alaska’s Secrets
Eighty miles north of Fairbanks, the road narrowed until it was no longer a road at all, just a suggestion pressed into the land by habit and stubbornness. Beyond that, there were cabins spaced by miles and silence, where the sky stretched so wide it could swallow a person whole.
That was where Lila went in May.
She met him on a bright afternoon that seemed impossible for Alaska, with the sun high and warm, the air smelling of spruce and thawing earth. His name was Aaron Hale, and he came into the small trading post where she worked part-time that summer, brushing dust from his shoulders as if he’d just stepped out of the wilderness itself.
He smiled easily, chatted about many subjects, and knew everyone.
“You’re new,” he said.
She nodded. “Just for the season. Got a room in the back.”
“You won’t wanna to leave,” he told her. It sounded like a promise.
By July, she believed him.
They spent evenings by the river, the light lingering late into the night, turning everything gold. He brought her grayling wrapped in foil, cooked over a fire. He laughed often, loud and warm. He told her about winters that made men honest and summers that made them forget everything else.
“Y’ever seen the aurora?” he asked once.
“No.”
“You will,” he said. “First winter. It’ll change you.”
He kissed her then, sudden and certain, like the rest of him. By August, they were married. It happened fast. Everyone said that’s how it went up there. Short summers, short patience for waiting. You grabbed what felt right and held on.
His cabin sat back from a stand of black spruce, its logs dark with age and weather. A woodpile stacked neatly in a row beside the walkway. There was a small porch leading into an entrance shed, the muck room, he called it.
“You don’t bring th’ outside in,” he told her, showing her the place. “Boots stay here. Always.”
Rows of heavy winter boots lined the wall even in August, Sorels, Bogs, Muck Boots, including hers, like silent sentries waiting for their season.
She laughed at them then. Winter felt like a story someone else had told.
***
It came in September, quiet at first.
Frost edged the windows. The river slowed and thickened. The light shortened day by day until it seemed to vanish altogether.
By November, the world had closed in.
Snow fell and did not stop. It buried the path, the porch, and the old truck. It buried everything until the cabin sat in a white silence that pressed against the walls.
Aaron moved through it easily. He knew where to step, how to use showshoes and cut a trail, how to read the sky. Only he went out.
“Too deep,” he told her when she offered. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
He took the snowmobile to the trading post, to the road, to wherever it was he went when he disappeared for hours at a time. He came back with groceries, with bottles, with a mood she learned to read the moment the door opened.
The muck room became her boundary. Like everyone else in the area, she tossed the household garbage out onto the snow at the edge of the yard. It’d be covered the next day and frozen there till summer.
Inside, the cabin smelled of wood smoke and close air. Outside, the cold could kill you in minutes. Between them, the muck room, unheated, dim, lined with boots and stiff coats. That was where the outside stopped, and the inside began.
She dreaded the sound of the snowmobile returning.
At first, it was small things. A grip too tight on her arm. A sharp word when she spoke out of turn. The way his eyes would harden when she hesitated.
“You’re muh wife. Do whut I say,” he said once, as if it explained everything.
By the time the sun stopped rising altogether, she understood.
There was nowhere to go.
Even if there had been, she didn’t know how to get there. No road she could follow, no neighbor she could reach on foot through snow that swallowed fences and swallowed paths and swallowed sound.
The nights were the worst.
The cabin creaked in the cold, the wind scraping along the logs like something alive. He would drink, and the man she had married in the golden light of July would disappear entirely. Something harder remained. Colder. Demanding. If she resisted, he made sure she wouldn’t the next time.
Bruises bloomed and faded and bloomed again. She learned to move carefully, to speak carefully, to exist in the narrowest way possible. Time blurred. Days and nights lost their edges. The world became the cabin. The cabin became him.
***
It was in December that everything broke. The storm had been going on for two days straight, the kind that erased even the sky. He came back late, drunker than usual, his face red with cold and anger.
She had done something wrong. She never knew what. The first blow came before she could speak. She went down hard against the table, the breath leaving her in a rush. He shouted words that tangled and slurred, but the meaning was clear enough in his hands. It went on longer than the others. Long enough that something inside her shifted.
Not fear. That had already filled every corner of her. Something quieter. Something that waited. When it was over, he stumbled into the chair by the stove, breathing hard, reaching for the bottle.
She lay on the floor, staring at the underside of the table, at the knife marks and burn scars etched into the wood. Her ears rang. Her body ached in places she couldn’t name.
He laughed once, a low, ugly sound. “Git up.”
She didn’t move.
“Get. Up, I said.”
Her hand found the handle of the skillet where it rested on the lower shelf of the stove. Heavy cast iron, blackened from years of use. She didn’t think about it. If she had, she might not have done it. She stood slowly, the skillet hanging loose at her side.
He looked at her, irritation turning to something sharper.
“What are you—”
She swung. The sound was dull. Final.
He dropped where he sat, the bottle slipping from his hand and rolling across the floor. For a long time, she didn’t move.
The storm outside swallowed the noise. The cabin held its breath. She waited for him to get up.
He didn’t.
***
The muck room was nearly as cold as the outdoors, the rest of the cabin, warm. She worked through the night. Breathing out puffs of smoke, the boards came up easier than she expected, the nails old and loose. Beneath them, the ground was already hard, the frost pushing up from below.
She didn’t dig far. Just enough.
By the time she finished, her gloved hands were aching from the pointed shovel handle, her breath coming in thin clouds that lingered in the dim light. She put the boards back carefully. Set the boots in place. Sorels. Bogs. Muck Boots, except for the ones she’d put on his feet. Everything where it belonged.
***
Winter settled in fully after that. The snowmobile sat where he’d left it.
She learned to use it. At first, she kept her trips short. To the trading post. Back again. No one asked too many questions. That was the way of things out there.
In January, the sheriff came.
He knocked, stamping snow from his boots before stepping into the muck room, removing his boots, then into the cabin.
“You seen Aaron?” he asked.
She shook her head, wrapping her arms around herself.
“He went out hunting,” she said. “Took snowshoes, rifle, and backpack. Said he’d be back in a couple days.”
The sheriff frowned slightly, looking around the cabin.
“That was when?”
“Couple weeks ago.”
He nodded slowly.
“Storm could’ve got him turned around,” he said. “Happens.”
She lowered her eyes.
“I figured.”
He lingered a moment longer, then sighed.
“Let me know if you hear anything.”
“I will.”
He left, the door closing behind him with a solid finality.
***
The months passed.
She worked part-time at the trading post when she could, using the snowmobile he’d left behind. People were kind in the distant way people are in places like that. They offered help without asking too much.
No one looked too closely. No one asked what they didn’t want answered.
Spring came slowly, the light returning in hesitant increments. The snow softened. The world began to breathe again.
In the muck room, the boards stayed firm. The boots remained in their places. By the time the thaw came in earnest, the ground beneath had held its secret well.
And Lila, who had come north in the golden light of June, stepped out into the first real warmth of the year alone.
No longer waiting. No longer afraid. Just quiet. Like the land itself.
M.D. Smith of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewilderingstories.com, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. You can find him at https://mdsmithiv.com/
Powerful, excellent writing. Chill up my spine. Also, I know that road north from Fairbanks. As rural as it gets.