The Cabin

My name is Boy, and I grew up in a cabin in the wilderness where there was nothing but mountains and snow for miles and miles. Believe me, I checked. It was my whole world where I had lived with my parents. They seemed like regular people, who loved each other and who loved me a great deal. I was homeschooled and my father taught me math, science, social studies and physical education, while my mother taught me languages, astronomy, cooking, gardening and all the other miscellaneous skills she thought I might need in life. But the most important subject my mother taught me was legal and defense as she was a criminal defense lawyer, and my father was a history professor before the world ended or so they told me.  

My parents told me the world had ended before I was born because of a nuclear war. They were some of the last survivors. They came to live here in the wilderness in the aftermath because it had been the only safe area after all the radiation. There were no books about it as there was no one left to write the books. I loved to read but there were such a limited number of books and most of them were part of my curriculum. My mother was also a reader, so we still had some books in the house, but I had read them all a long time ago. The characters in all the stories always had such pretty names as Peter and Sandra, unlike mine which was just Boy. I was quite ahead academically, according to my parents, as I didn't have any distractions around me. My favorite bedtime story had been how my parents had escaped the war, I made Father tell it again and again. But that was until the baby came along.  

Everything changed the day she came into my life. Before her, it was just me, mother and father, we studied, ate and played and went to sleep. I was happy with my life, I was satisfied, sure I wanted more but I knew I could not have any more because the whole world had ended, and I had settled for my life. Baby was about five years younger than me. I was almost twelve when she asked me for the first time about how the world had ended, though Father had already explained to her in detail but still she kept asking more and more questions. When Father scolded her and gave her a time out for being disrespectful, I felt sad for her. Father had never scolded me like this, maybe because I never pushed him like that, ever.  

Then it became a regular thing, Baby was always getting a timeout as she was always asking questions that my parents seemed to have no answer for. The older she grew the harder it became for our parents to contain her in our cabin and all the wilderness around it seemed small to her. By the time she turned fifteen, our parents couldn’t control or ground her anymore. She had outperformed all her classes and had read every single piece of paper in our house and even that proved insufficient for her growing curiosity. Our mother had been teaching her from the lawbooks since she was ten, and now she excelled in all of them. We had mock trials in the house, and she found loopholes in the laws and always won. Mother always said Baby was too smart for her own good and I agreed with her. For our physical activity classes, father made us run loops of the house from afternoon to sundown, hoping Baby would be too tired to cause anymore mischief around the house. It worked for a while and as we became stronger and better at all the physical activities, the trials began again.  

I enjoyed those years the most, there was never a dull moment around the house. Baby was always up to something; she was a never tiring, never satisfied, overactive machine of a kid. My parents, on the other hand, had aged rapidly in those years. They seemed to be always fighting, but all their arguments were hushed, we never found out the cause of their conflicts. Earlier all their disagreements had been about how to handle Baby, what new punishment to give her, how to engage her so that she won’t play any other pranks like setting up dangerous traps like digging pits and covering them with branches or setting tripwires that could cause falls and injuries or entering unknown caves risking getting lost or trapped. Grounding her inside the house also proved to be just as harmful as she was always up to something. But lately all their arguments had turned into some sort of secret, as they used to stop speaking the moment we entered the room and had started sleeping in different rooms.  

One day, after Baby and I returned after taking laps around the house, Mother asked us to go hunting and bring some rabbits as she wanted to start dinner soon. We left immediately as it seemed we had interrupted another one of their fights. As it was summertime, the creek was flowing, Baby started prepping her weapons and we hid behind a tree and waited for the opportune moment to grab us a rabbit. We waited for quite some time and though we didn’t find any rabbit, a bear found us. I immediately signaled Baby to lay down on the ground and played dead. It snuffed us and flipped us over, but we didn’t move a muscle and eventually it left us alone. By then, we had no appetite left and we ran towards home to tell our parents of our fun encounter. Until now only Father had had bear encounters but now, we had one under our belts too. Our parents were unexpectedly terrified as we narrated our incident to them happily. Afterall, we did live in wilderness. 

But since that episode with the bear something changed in Baby, she became calmer and there were no more pranks or even arguments happening around the house. Our parents also started fighting less, there were no more secret discussions, everybody seemed happier somehow, but I sensed that something was brewing with Baby. Even though there were no more outward displays of restlessness as before, she was up to something. I asked her repeatedly, but she always refused any answer until one evening I caught her taking some rations and stuffing it in a bag, which she kept under her bed. When I asked her what it was and where she found it, she told me that our parents had a secret stash of unbelievable things in the basement of the house, things we had read about in books. I told her that our house had no basement, to which she rolled her eyes and promised to show it to me the next day. Next morning, after breakfast, when our parents were busy with their chores of repairing and remaking, she took me to our parents' room and lifted a flap off the floor which was hidden under a box and beneath it were stairs that led to a secret room, the basement. I asked her how she found it when I, who was five years her senior, had never known it existed. She told me that I was very naive, and she had known about the basement since she was eleven and mother knew she knew and had told her never to discuss it with either Father or you. 

That came as a shock. Mother knew and had asked Baby to hide it from me. Why would she do that? I had always gone about my life thinking that I was the responsible kid out of the two of us, the kid that our parents loved most because I never caused them any anxiety the way Baby did. All the lessons Mother had taught us both about honesty and truth felt hollow now. There was a whole area in our house that our parents had hidden from me, then what else were they hiding? But there was no more time to think about that now as the room in front of me held the most fascinating things that I had only read about until now like a cell phone, backpacks, mechanical cords, some sort of air Frier, so many magazines. They had such pretty pictures, why had our parents kept them hidden? The more I explored the more amazed I was. The room was full of so many things that could have been so helpful to them in the past like plastic bottles, straws and paper towels. Baby showed me a bicycle. As soon I had read about it, I had wanted a bicycle so badly when I was a kid, but Father told me all the bicycles perished in the nuclear war. Why would they do this to me? They had decided they could tell Baby about all this but not me. I asked Baby what she was planning to do by packing that bag with food. She told me that she was going to run away, and I should come with her. Without hesitation, I agreed with her. There was no way I could live with my parents in this house anymore. The radiation must have reduced by now, it had been over twenty years since the war. 

That night turned out to be the longest night of my life. I kept thinking how Mother and Father had deceived me my whole life. I thought of confronting them many times and each time I wondered if they could hide a basement in my own house for my whole life then what else were they hiding from me. This thought didn’t let me sleep. I didn’t trust Baby much either, after all she had hidden about the basement for almost five years, until I had pried it out of her. Next day, after breakfast, we went out hunting as usual but since both Baby and I had a lot of things on our minds we didn't spend any extra time sitting by the creek and came back much earlier than usual. This went on for a few days, eventually my parents decided it was time for an intervention. They sat both of us down after lunch and asked us what was bothering us. By then I was so resentful of them that I stormed out five minutes later, without saying a word. My parents started having their secret arguments yet again. 

One day, Baby suggested we listen to them while they talked to each other in hushed tones. It seemed wrong but considering how they had wronged us our whole life, this was only a minor transgression. As we snuck upon them from behind the window, we heard Mother telling Father that it had been 21 years, and it was now time to tell the kids the truth. Father didn’t seem to agree with her at all and he told her how it could disrupt their whole lives and Mother retorted by saying that if he hadn’t noticed our kids did not have much of a life anyway and their constant bickering was only making their life difficult. Father said they should wait at least a couple of years more before telling the kids the truth. Baby and I looked at each other full of apprehension and curiosity and decided to confront them right away. 

The moment our parents saw us they realized they had been caught in their lie. They sat us down and began telling us the story of their life. They had been orphans and outcasts all their lives. They had found each other by fate and realized early on that they were a perfect fit for each other. They were very successful in their respective careers, but they always felt disconnected from the world. They used to go on long holidays to remote places where they didn’t see another face for days on end and they would get back recharged and ready to face the world. They both had jobs that required them to interact with a lot of people daily and they could barely get on with their days without getting away every few weeks. Once my mother got pregnant, they decided on a second honeymoon to Alaska. They planned to stay there for two weeks but ended up staying for two months and by the time they got back they had both lost their jobs and they were happier for it. While staying in Alaska, they came across another couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who were also recluses like them. Though they tried very hard to avoid each other, still they kept coming in each other’s ways. Eventually when they spoke, they told each other their absolute need to be away from all civilization. Mr. Smith told them that he was InCharge of the local police station there. There were not many of them and those who were there rarely ever visited this far into the wilderness. That's when Mother said to Father, “I wish we could stay here forever.” They came back a month later and settled here forever. The Smiths made sure nobody ever visited this area ever. They marked it as inaccessible and helped Mother and Father set up their home and then with childbirth. With time it proved to be the best decision of their lives. But lately they had been feeling like their kids did not deserve this life that they had forced on them, especially Baby. That’s why there had been so many fights lately in their otherwise very successful marriage. Mother wanted to tell everything to Boy and Baby and Father wanted to wait until Baby was at least eighteen years old. Their names were Mrs. Collin Harris and Mr. David Harris, and they never named their kids anything but Boy and Baby. 

As my parents ended their life story, Baby and I sat dumbfounded, unable to utter a single word. Then Baby started speaking and nobody could stop her. She blamed them for not giving us a normal life and for turning us into freaks and how will they adjust to life even after moving into active society. I just sat there and listened to first her, then Mother and then Father explain how they would always help us in any way they could. They had some money saved with the Smiths for emergencies and as Mr. Smith told them a few years back he had invested it wisely and it had multiplied manyfold since then.  

They all sat there talking for hours it seemed, while I was just thinking, so, the world was where the world had always been. It had not ended. There was not much left to do now but to go out and explore it. It would present its own challenges, but he was ready. The first order of business was to give himself and Baby proper names, which my parents had failed to give us, along with many many other things. But one area where my parents had not failed us was education. We were both excellent in high school education and had special knowledge of both history and American Law system. Our whole lives lay ahead of us, and I was going to take care of my little sister until she turned eighteen.  

I was ready but the thoughts in my head couldn’t stop churning. How do we know what is real and what’s not? What if we find out that whatever we’ve known until now had been an illusion? What if all our beliefs and convictions had been nothing more than lies fed to us over the years by our parents, society. They thought we’d never find out the real way the world works but how long could they hide us in that cabin?