The Shuddering

by Ania Ahlborn

The drips of blood that trailed him like scarlet breadcrumbs assured him that this wasn’t a dream.

The monsters of his youth were chasing him. They were hungry. They were real.

They only come when it snows, his dad had told him, repeating the stories his own father had whispered into his ear in the dead of winter. As a kid, Don assumed it was why he and his family packed up their stuff and left the cabin when the weather got bad. But as he grew older, he reasoned the stories away. Myth. Legend. Whatever he called them in the past made no difference.

relationships were complicated, volatile things. They were riddled with lies, with hidden secrets, ones you only found out about when it was too late.

And Sawyer had been even worse. He had scared his mother half to death when she found a dead bird stuffed in their freezer between two pints of Blue Bell ice cream, frozen solid in a ziplock bag.

“If I told you what happened, you would never leave this room again.”

It was one of those storms people never forgot, the kind that refused to let up until the food and firewood were gone.

If they didn’t starve, they’d freeze. And if those two fates didn’t get them first, the beasts that lingered in the trees would.

But she continued to stare at the shuddering pine in the distance. Her eyes wide. So impossibly wide.