Work Text:
It was a cold morning, overwhelmingly so. The mercury thermometer showed -26°C, the dirt roads lay ice covered and void of cars or any significant life, a breeze rolls snow over the barren fields causing it to undulate and roll with gentle pulses. A mans coral parka barely visible in the distance, through the window of a log cabin serves as the only significant indication of human life. A woman with strawberry blonde hair hidden by her black beanie and cloaked again by her dusty purple jacket. Her face, bare and exposed stung with a bitter pain as the wind sunk its vicious fangs into her rose colored face. She carried as many logs as she could bare to, her mittened fingers struggling to hold them much longer dropped the logs in front of the cabin door. She turned to open the iced handle but found the wood door frozen shut. She let out a sigh, her breath clouding her vision before slamming her shoulder into the door. It didn't budge. She hit the door again with her shoulder, loosening the ice and causing the door to fall open. The woman pulled the logs inside and closed the door behind her before retreating to the warmth of the hearth. The parka sheathed man came down the stairs, bundled in a thick wool blanket, he moved the wood toward the fire to allow it to dry. Placing the blanket around the woman, he kissed her head and relaxed into an old rocker, creaking slowly. "The winter is hardly halfway through and we are nearly out of matches." He groaned, "we need to conserve them, try to keep the fire burning." The woman sighed, clearly annoyed and muttered "I'm trying Bill, its kind of hard when I need to do everything myself since all you do is sit in the garage working all day, every day." (He had been working on fixing their crop duster for some time.) He stood up from his rocker, clearly frustrated "do you want to get out of here or not? I'm trying, Sdenka!" Bill pushed the rocker to the side and went back upstairs, closing the door behind him. Sdenka sighed, laid herself out on the couch underneath a plush wool blanket, and drifted off to sleep. Sdenka woke up to a shout from her husband who had been drinking heavily this night, Sdenka pretended to be asleep. Bill sat down at the hearth with a stumble. In his hand was a bottle of Spirnoff, which he took swigs from occasionally. In an attempt to stand up he spilled the cheap whiskey. He managed himself up and drunkenly waltzed up to his wife, pulling her up to their room to put her to sleep. Upon dragging her into bed he collapsed upon the bed and they slept.
3:17, that was the time on the alarm clock when Sdenka woke up in a sweat. This was unusual, the day was cold and the night was colder. She sat up, taking off her jacket before sitting up in her bed and reaching over to grab a book. After about 20 minutes of reading she finally got up to check the fire, placing an old receipt in between her pages to mark her place. When Sdenka walked out to check the fire she certainly found it, infact she found the entire main room of her cabin up in flames, her husbands alcohol leading a trail of fire throughout her home, the flame was just beginning to spread toward her kitchen where her husbands alcohol was lain scattered around the room. She ran back into her room, waking her husband she cried "Bill get up! The lodge is on fire!" Drunkenly, he dismissed her. The lodge had no windows as to not let the draft in, so Sdenka opened her bedroom door which flames were now beginning to lick and she ran out through the living room flames, she grabbed the fire engulfed door by the handle and threw it open. With it, she threw herself out into the harsh cold, throwing her wool sweater (which had caught fire as well) into the white void which filled her world. As soon as she had made it maybe thirty paces away from the house, the serpent that was the cold once again bore its vicious fangs, this time not into her protective puffer (which at this point was laying on her bedroom floor, consumed by flames) and not into her wool sweater, but this time the wind blew so viciously and it pierced directly through her cotton shirt and shook the very fiber of her being with a reminder of why she lay inside, protected by the same flame whipped serpents that now threatened her life.
She moved herself into the outhouse, closing the door and sitting herself on the floor in a futile attempt to protect herself from the wind. She pulled her arms into her shirt, swaddling them around herself and her body began to go numb as she drifted off to sleep, being swaddled by the serpents body. She was warm.