The Longest Night

She lifted her head after a while and watched the grey sky while the victim continued to scream. So numb to it all, now. It was the tragedy in Fort McMurray which told her that she didn’t belong with anyone anymore; a life of solitude was the only one she belonged to. She tried not to remember what had happened, but she found that the screaming had subsided long before she stopped dwelling on the past. She kept going.

A month had passed in Fort McMurray before she was forced to flee. After the most horrific nights of her life, she came across the cabin on McClelland Lake, just a few kilometres out of the settlement of the same name. Most of the food in the fridge had spoiled, but in the pantry were boxes of macaroni and cheese, cans of tomato paste, graham crackers, and canned rhubarb and strawberries. It was enough to last her a while. On the porch, she found packs of potato chips and a few flats of bottled water.

The house was small, built for two; there was one bedroom, and a bathroom (which, of course, no longer worked), and the living room and kitchen were connected as one. The house was left relatively unchanged, save for a hole she had carved through the roof above a fire pit she had made in the middle of the living room floor. During the summer, she would collect vast amounts of water from the lake and boil it. Not as good as the bottled water, but she knew to save those for more special occasions. Catherine took her time.

Baths were far and few between, but when she did bathe, she used a generous amount of dish soap, and spent an hour wiping down her body by the fire with a rag. Every time she washed, she saw clearly just how much she was wasting away. In her mind’s eye, she still looked like the healthy Catherine from years ago, back when she was a young, naive student. But as the firelight bounced off her sheet-white skin, she couldn’t help but recognize the veins and bones that were plainly visible now. Her hips, knee and elbow joints moved under constraint of her tight weathered skin, and her ribs created valleys on her body which hadn’t existed before. Her eyes appeared to have sunk to the back of her head, underscored with black rings. She caught a glimpse of herself in the cracked mirror across from the fire as she bathed, and she looked back at herself, fragmented and broken. Who is that? she thought. She ceased to exist; only her withered shell remained.

Why did she keep going? Perhaps it was only her natural preservation outlawing the thought of death. Perhaps it was because she knew that if she was dead, she could no longer revisit the memories which she held dear. Her childhood. Her mother. Him.

The desire to feel. Her memories were flashes of light that no one else would experience. They would not be recorded in a history for the benefit of any being living anywhere. Suicide? She couldn’t bear to fail again. But maybe she truly was too scared. His face, his eyes on hers…she never wanted to lose the ability to remember that image, no matter how useless it appeared to be.

Time sped up as she meandered, looking down at her feet. She was lost in old thoughts of that time, unable to leave them behind. When the sun was sinking low again, she was dragged back to here and now. Little daylight for travel in the winter, time so precious. She decided she would make camp the moment the sun had officially set and turned it back on her. It meant at least another hour of travelling. She came across a slope and stepped precariously down it.

A muted groan caught her attention; she turned her head slightly and threw herself off her step, letting the doe and sack drop off her shoulders. She grabbed the gun as it slipped down her arm, pulled it into her grasp and aimed it on the man in the clearing. “Don’t move!” she barked in a scratchy, alien voice. She hadn’t spoken a word in weeks; her throat might as well have been clogged with dust.

The man who was seated in the snow froze. His back was to her. He wore a hat and a long cloak, both midnight black, making him stick out harshly in the sea of white. The seam down the back of his left sleeve was split, down spilling out. He had a large pack on his back, with a machete tied to the side.

“Get rid of the knife!” she shouted, her voice breaking. She was forced to clear her throat.

His hand came across his side and he clumsily undid the throng holding the blade to the bag. He groped for it as it fell behind him, then he weakly threw it away with a pained grunt.

“Turn towards me!” she demanded more clearly, shifting her grip on the shotgun.

He planted his hands in the snow beside him and began to drag himself around very slowly, breathing with constraint. She spotted blood staining the white snow. She had a white-knuckle grip on the gun until she saw his face.

Weakness spread in her arms and legs. She fought to stay standing as a nostalgic feeling akin to amazement washed over her. She lowered the gun and straightened.

It couldn’t be. Her mind must have been groping for any semblance of a time when she could have been happy, and this was just an illusion.

His laboured billowed like thick smoke. His coat was open, revealing his blood-soaked shirt underneath, but despite an injury his face was soft.

The shotgun dropped from her hands. She walked down the slight slope of the valley with slow, misplaced, apprehensive steps. As she approached him, he winced, but his eyes never left hers. He watched her so intently that Catherine felt that he was looking right into her thoughts and reading them.

She came to a stop by his side and fell to her knees. His brow was still strong, resting over hard eyes with a long elegant nose surrounded by soft, masculine cheeks, underlined by thin lips and an angular jaw, which was covered in a short and relatively clean beard. She looked over his face, studying the small details. It was as if he never had left her on the platform.

It’s you.

He let out a ragged breath, his eyes rolled, and he fell back into the snow. Catherine looked him over. The blood stain. She touched it gently, studied his unconscious face, felt her heart cramp.

She ran hurriedly back up the slope like a newborn foal to her shotgun and bag, and brought them back down. On the way she tore open the sack and pulled out a plastic tarp, a line of rope, water, and a hunting knife. She fanned the tarp out beside him. It fell slowly, too slowly for her urgency. Her hands fought with the cap of the water bottle. Once opened she pushed his shirt up and poured water over his injury sloppily. She then tore off a strip of her shirt with shaking hands, folded it up, and placed it against his stomach. Cutting off a piece of rope, she tied the bundle securely to his waist.

She moved over to his head and took hold of him by his arm pits. She grunted as she hauled him upwards with all her strength and dragged him onto the tarp. His body felt unbearably heavy, but she made sure to let him down as gently as possible before picking up his feet and moving them onto the tarp as well. She cut holes in the tarp and tied each end of the rope through the makeshift openings, creating a rein for her to pull the tarp by. Sit was when she had tied the last loop that she realized she could not carry her equipment, the man, and the doe at the same time. She looked over to where she dropped the animal, and without a second thought’s hesitation, threw her bag and shotgun onto her back, pulled the rein over her head and onto her hips, and left the game behind.

Manoeuvring through the trees proved difficult, and slowed her progress immensely. But Catherine had never felt more determined, alive, nor more driven since the disaster. For the first time in two years, she smiled.