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.

That man, just like her father had been, lacking foresight but quick to learn.

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

A future was just that: the rest of your life. A relationship could crumble at any opportunity.

Ever since she was a kid, she’d cry when she was scared or angry, as though processing an excess of emotion at once was too much for her to handle.

“I have my radar set to batshit. I can smell a psycho from a mile away.”

Passive-aggressiveness had slithered into his bloodstream, infecting him like a disease.

She wondered whether this was how it felt to be lost, alone, spiraling toward some inevitable fate. The endless expanse of white, the silence, the solitude were overwhelming.