"Sage"
 (excerpt)

     Hank's old cabin had indeed needed some fixing up. Perhaps Mabel had been the one to keep it up, and every corner spoke of her absence. Cobwebs whispered from the ceiling, dust grumbled on the counters and shelves, the floor complained as she crept across it feeling so much like an interloper, an outsider, unwelcomed, unwanted. She paused at curtains that had been left to fade in the sun of several seasons, pulled them aside, and let cold white winter light fill the single room. She'd been left to find the place alone. While Hank had said he was happy to have someone in the place, he still could not think of travelling out to see it empty, fearing the ghost of his beloved, so she made her way around alone, first the chilled inside of the abandoned cottage that had once sheltered the loving pair. Turning from the window to face the emptiness, she took stock: Four walls, two windows, one door. A small sleeping loft filled the west corner, blankets still neatly folded near the back. An enameled sink occupied the opposite end of the room, a stove by its side; two squatters, hunkered down and silent. A tiny icebox sat alone and dejected in the corner, a coffee pot and a tin of oatmeal adorning the top. Hank and Mabel had simply left to run to town, it seemed; everything lay as they had left it, including two chipped enameled bowls in the sink, their contents long since picked over by mice and spiders. From the window on the north side, Sage could see the shadows of vines that had grown up against the side of the cabin. Upon opening the curtain she could see where they had tried to force their way in through the cracks the summer before, only to be pushed back by winter's cold hands. Two checkered wool coats hung on hooks by the door, a matching pair. She'd picked one up only to have it fall apart in her hands, the mice and moths having beaten her to it. She held the threads to her, turning her back to the wall and let herself go, sliding to the floor she cried for the first time in months. Wondering also for the first time, what she thought she was going to do. Was this after all, not just an exercise in futility, this redefinition she was trying to pull off? Could she become someone else, leave the fires behind, or was she dreaming awake, the product of having spent too many nights sleepless? She pulled the pieces of the coat to her chest, let her head drop and pulled her knees up tightly to her, feeling the cold reach its winter fingers under the door, into her heart, and did nothing to stop it. Anything, she thought, to put out the fire there. She sat and let the cold harden into her until at last the sun began to slip over the tops of the trees. Sage realized she would soon be in darkness if she did not look for candles and firewood. She stretched out aching knees, one at a time, slowly pulled herself from the floor, and tried to hang the rags of coat back on its hook. Standing outside the door, her eyes took in the cold white shadows that swallowed the house, the threadbare trees, the heavy frost in the shadows, the cedars that towered in scattered columns on all sides. The sound of a dog barking across the distance from a place she could neither picture nor quite understand jolted her from her stillness, and she searched the sides of the house for wood.
      Newspapers stood in what appeared to be a neat pile beside a long unused wood stove, but Sage disturbed a pair of nesting mice as she began to stoke the stove. With windfall from around the grounds, she built a smoky fire that disturbed a bat from the rafters of the house, and she was quickly overwhelmed, stumbling out into the now darkness of mid afternoon, leaving the door open behind her to relieve the house of its smoke. She stood crying and coughing on the porch, shaking with frustration and fear, determined to sleep in the car and leave in the morning.
      "I am such a fool" she thought out loud. She wrapped her arms around her too thin frame and huddled in against the wall of the house, trying to get out of the wind. The long driveway hid the house from the road completely, and though she could hear a car turn onto it, she couldn't find the strength to put on a brave face for whatever it was that moved toward her now. She stood angry and frustrated under the eaves of the porch and waited.