Kangaroo In Winter (2021) · 3:03pm Nov 3rd, 2021
In summertime, Vivian cuts down enough trees to burn in her stove throughout the winter. When the snow melts, she goes out with her axe once again.
Her cabin has one room and one closet. One bed and one stove. The closet has shelves on only two of its walls because it’s only as wide as the door, and the door opens inwards, and Vivian cringes at the inefficient design every time she goes for a meal or a coffee. Her low bed sits in a corner by the door, always made, covered in sheets and rugs that she washes every two weeks at a river an hour’s hike away, where she also gets her water. She has no books and no puzzles. She’s usually out felling trees.
She starts every morning with a mug of coffee. She wraps herself up in an undersized blanket no matter the temperature and stands by the window. She holds the coffee with both paws. If she doesn’t, her free paw will idly finger at the edge of her pouch.
The steps to the front door have gradually broken down under her weight, so she leaps over them on her way out to her work.
There’s a kick that she gets out of taking them down. When there’s a big enough wedge that it starts to creak and tilt, she stands with her body slack and listens to it groan on its way to the forest floor. The pain in her paws, wrists, elbows and shoulders will fade, and every creature for miles will go deathly silent. When she’s ready to move again, she hoists her axe to segment her trophy down into manageable chunks. Sometimes it’s an hour before she moves.
She likes felling the big ones the most.
Every year she wears through her gloves and has to knit new ones. She changes the colour each time, creating signposts in her memory. Red was the first year. She can remember the order of each colour—what came before and after—but she gets overwhelmed if she tries to count how many she’s gone through. She thinks it’s funny that she can turn two fully grown trees into three hundred logs of firewood per day, six days a week, for half of an entire year, and yet counting how long she’s been doing so is what makes her want to lie down.
When her paws are too wretched to uncurl, she hikes the valley with her paws in her jacket pockets clutching the leaves her mother taught her could soothe muscles. She checks on the markers she left all over the valley when her gloves were still red. An arrow with half a head, scratched into the face of a rock, pointing away from her cabin to trick others into going the wrong way. She wonders if he remembers the trick.
Once, when her gloves were deep purple, she worried she might eventually take down all the trees in the valley and have nothing left to do. But she did some rough math and the forest came out firmly on top. The next day she grew sick with fever, nearly collapsed under a falling tree, and was in bed for who knows how long. In her dreams, the trees re-appeared behind her back, multiplied to more than they were when she arrived. They closed in on her cabin and dared her to take them down again. When the fever broke she woke miles away from her cabin, her fur sopped in sweat, cradled under a bowing birch tree she didn’t recognize. It took her a day to find one of her arrows. She’s been planting saplings ever since.
The nearest town is eight days away. If it was eight minutes, she still wouldn’t go.
Every time she sharpens her axe, she test it on her hair. She folds her ears and pulls her hair tight and pushes the blade through. She hasn’t seen a mirror since she came here. She thinks that’s probably for the best.
When winter comes, she stays inside by the fire, footpaws and rounded legs poking out from under the undersized blanket. Her only exercise is the maintenance on her stove whenever it breaks. She dreams in her chair, wide awake. She listens to the howling of wolves. She pictures the smoke rising into the deep blue sky above her cabin, wonders if anyone sees it. Once a day she goes outside to make sure the column of smoke is still there, as if it wouldn’t be suffocating her inside her cabin if it wasn’t; as if smoke could go anywhere but up, up, up.
Up, up, up.
That was how he said it.
There’s enough food in her closet to keep her going for many years still. Enough yarn for gloves of many shades. When she only has 40 meals left, she’ll leave with the dried packages in her pouch and set off for Kieran’s Bastion to see if Morris has any work for her. If he’s still alive. For now, she likes having no money and no need for it. She likes checking her etched arrows. She likes putting smoke in the sky.
In summertime, Vivian fells trees, scratches stone, and eats through her stockpile, and when winter comes she burns through her logs. When the snow melts, she’ll go out with her axe once again.
The rumour come out: Does Miller Minus is furry?
Is this you???