Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into a month. Eventually, I lost track of time, days melting together in a desperate mirage. Search parties came and went, I would find out, never to discover us. There was only so much we could do. Naturally, as the aspiring doctor, and the least squeamish, I became the main provider, hunting down anything I could find. Small game, the rare deer… they kept us going but never filled the void. Memories of the juicy bites of my mother’s cooking made my stomach roil in yearning. Fall’s frosted breath began to prickle our skin, and I became impatient.
By the winter, we had withered to vacant carcasses, doing what we could to get by. One by one the forest took them, each time more brutal than the next. The small stream we discovered in a clearing, a sight that once had us on our knees in praise of salvation, was the match that lit the flame. A couple sips of poorly filtered water and Gabbie fell ill, lips pale and marked with the sheen of cold sweat. A couple days later, we woke to a corpse. She was the first to go. I was tasked with the disposal of her body, and I hid among the trees, letting the fire consume her.
The day our misguided hope got us to cross a couple of wobbly logs dropped over a ravine to get past the wreck we were trapped behind: a crack of sodden wood and Breanna slipped, laying motionless a hundred feet below. We lost ourselves then, and the overwhelm of grief and exhaustion manifested in the hollowing of our cheeks as we were reduced to an emaciation of what once was. Every night, the wailing returned, only louder, and the creature seemed to take on a more depraved form each visit, warping into nightmarish visions I could barely distinguish from reality. Riley, without fail, stayed with me as I cried myself to sleep.
And so three of us remained. Sophie prayed louder now, the words tumbling from her lips in a desperate hymn. But it wasn’t about salvation anymore. She was looking for someone to blame, finding the scapegoat. “Why did God let this happen to us?” she cried by the ravine one night after I turned up empty handed from a hunting trip, wild eyes landing on mine. “It’s your fault” she whispered, barely audible. “You led us here”. Her eyes flicked between Riley and me, breathless. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on here. Both of you—playing games with something sacred. I see it.” Her voice was rising now, panicked and trembling. “You think you won’t be punished? Look at us! Look where we are!” Riley stood unflinching, a shameful notch between her brows as her eyes bore into the side of my face. When I met her gaze, my breath caught in my throat. For a moment, I swear I saw them- antlers, large and jagged, twisting from the sides of her head.
I don’t know what happened after that. One moment, Sophie was standing there, screaming with her arms stretched to the sky, and in a heartbeat my hands were on her waist, sending her stumbling backwards. I watched, frozen, as she hit the bottom with a sickening sound, wine-red pooling in the pure pale snow. As I walked back to our camp, I didn’t look behind me. Couldn’t.
Riley wouldn’t look at me. The silence between us hung thick in the frigid air. That night, as the fire crackled softly, she had her knees drawn up to her chest, staring vacantly into the embers. She was crying, I realized, and she broke my heart all over again. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. I never meant to hurt her. I moved toward her, and without thinking, reached for her face, cupping it in my hands like it was something fragile, something just ours. I leaned in, my lips brushing hers, trembling with the weight of everything unspoken. Her eyes snapped up to mine, pulling back as her lip curled into something like disgust, and right then, everything between us shattered. She shoved me away roughly, the force of it leaving me breathless.
“What the hell are you doing?” she spat. “You can’t do that. Not here. Not after everything. I’m not some... I’m not…” She faltered, stepping back further with a wounded shake of her head. “You’re sick. You don’t get to do that to me.”
I could hear it in the cracked resignation in her voice, the dark cavities around her eyes, the heavy hang of her head. She was a shell of Riley now, ashamed of who she was, who she had become. She didn’t believe any more- God couldn’t save us. She slumped against a chopped tree trunk, folded into herself like she wanted to sink into the bark’s crevices, and dropped her head into her hands through choked sobs. I blinked and a tear ran warm against my December-flushed cheek. When I looked back up at her- she wasn’t there at all. Rather, a small fawn lay curled there in the snow, its spindly legs awkwardly tucked into itself, delicate and vulnerable, chest rising and falling in shallow succession. Like it didn’t belong here. Its wide, glassy eyes met mine in unyielded silence, searching for something lost. I realized then: I loved her too much to let her go. If she couldn’t love me, she could at least be a part of me.
And so I didn’t think when my fingers wrapped around the switchblade in my pocket and brought it flush against the creature’s throat, cold steel glinting under the moonlight. I didn’t ask why when I deftly sliced through skin, letting the warmth of blood trickle down my hands and onto the fresh fallen snow like teardrops. I didn’t stop when I carved its stomach open, as shaky hands slick and sticky in crimson tore raw flesh from bone, teeth ripping apart veins, tendons, heart. And for the first time in weeks, the hunger inside me was silenced.
Yet, sometimes, even after all these years,
she finds her way back to me.
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