The Thaw

It had been a long, hard winter there was no denying it.

Jake sat in the living room, staring at his wife Maddie laying on the couch across the room. She lay there in silence, as she had most days over the past several weeks. Drink in hand, he reflected on what he'd been through over the past year. What they’d been through, really. Neither of them had been prepared for the sort of pressures that isolation had brought on them. They hadn’t been prepared to stew in the juices of the flaws of their relationship, cut off from the rest of the world for months, but after the chaos that had been their life in Pittsburgh, they had jumped at the opportunity for some simplicity. For some “alone time”. When a position opened up as the game warden for Pennsylvania State Game Lands 13 all the way out in Sullivan County, they’d jumped at the idea. The lower cost of living would stretch is $40,000 a year salary much further, and with Maddie's editing jobs being as unreliable as they were, it sounded like exactly what they needed to get their lives and their relationship back on track.

No more outside pressures. No more traffic. No more pollution. It would be the two of them in a remote cabin without another person around for miles in any direction.

It had been a horrible mistake.

Jake shook his head and sighed, taking a drink from the whiskey in his glass.  

Things had started off wonderfully. They found a place off by itself, up in the mountains outside of a little town called Elk Grove. It was a cute little two-bedroom house that had a small stream in the back. Possibly a creek. Even with his job, he was never really sure where the distinction between the two laid. They’d brought boxes upon boxes of books, stocked up on supplies and gotten moved in by June the year before. The trees were lush and green, with wildflowers scattered along the ground.

“It beat the litter that we used to walk past back in The Burgh, right?” he asked Maddie, not expecting an answer. 

She never answered anymore. It was probably better that way, all things considered.

Shrugging, he fell back into his memory. It was safe there. He could move his brain into happier places. To better times.

He could think about the past summer when they went hiking together, or the time that they took a weekend trip to that resort over in the Poconos and he got a massage for the first time. He could think about how beautiful it was when the leaves started changing in the autumn. About how Maddie had looked like an angel when they took walks together in the twilight, coming home with the moon sitting low in the sky, bright as a spotlight and pregnant with possibilities for the coming days.

He grimaced and closed his eyes, dreading where this timeline took him next.

The weather had turned early that year, with temperatures dropping and snow and ice arriving in mid-November. The roads had become all but impassible by Thanksgiving, so they had to cancel plans to go to visit her family back home.

The winter would go on to be the worst on record for northern Pennsylvania. Snow falling in blankets, and temperatures plummeting because of something called an Arctic Vortex, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean, then staying on the wrong side of zero for nearly two straight months. Some sort of climate change bullshit, he guessed.

The why of it wasn’t nearly as important as what it meant: they were stuck with each other and nowhere to go.

The satellite on the TV was the only option for cable, but the weather had wreaked havoc on the damned thing. It was out more often than not. The internet was spotty during the best of times, and the ice and snow had proven to be more than a match for that thready connection.

With nowhere to go and no one to talk to but each other, the fighting had started.

He knew he was at least as much to blame as her. Tight quarters led to short tempers. He thought that was a saying. If it wasn’t, it damned well should be. The fact is that you never know how much someone that you care about can irritate the piss out of you until you have no option but to be around them for long stretches of time. 

Yeah, he left the house to do his patrols, but he rarely saw other people while doing them. Her job as an editor was mostly done through hard copies in the mail. It was an old-school approach, but she was an old school sorta girl in a lot of ways. It worked for her, and her clients didn’t seem to mind.

It started with small things. Fights over who’s turn it was to do what housework, then escalated from there, degenerating into accusations of lack of respect, accusations of mental abuse, and feelings of resentment on both sides.

What a fucking mess this had all turned out to be.

It reached the point where Jake actively tried to avoid staying in the same room as Maddie, convinced that no matter what he did, it would lead to another fight. He didn’t mean to start them, just like she claimed that she didn’t mean to either. But still, they happened. It was the one constant in their relationship over this past damned winter.

He opened his eyes again and looked at his wife, trying to recall the days when they’d fallen in love. The rush of emotions during their first date. The electricity of their first kiss. The warmth of her moist breath on his neck that had always driven him crazy. The feel of her as she moved under him when they made love.

It was a far cry from where they were now, sitting in this damned house in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, listening to the floorboards settle.

The last time they’d fought had been two weeks ago. It was a doozy. The worst they’d ever had. The worst they ever would have. He wasn't proud of what he'd said or how it had turned out.

Since then, She hadn’t said a word to him.

But now it was a time of renewal. A time for fresh starts. A time to leave the past hellish year behind them.

It as the first day of spring. Today was the day!

The flowers were blooming, the birds had returned, and most importantly, the ground was thawed.

He could finally bury Maddie’s body. 

After two weeks, the smell was becoming unbearable.