Nourish

I. Steam

This dream is always the same, because it’s also a memory. She sits near the end of the dock, her delicate frame perched on a small black cooler, her back to him, her face to the sun. The day is brilliant, early summer light off the water nearly blinding. Charlotte isn’t fishing, but the tackle box rests near her feet, well-used and unlatched. Her chestnut hair, wavy, idles on one shoulder before flowing softly its last several inches. Her head is lowered and Carl sees as he approaches, her elbows on her thighs and her hands in front of her, hidden. Hiding.

Carl glides closer, cautiously, not wanting to startle her but aching to know what secret she cradles. Some deeper part of him, the part that remembers dreaming this dream before, whispers to him that he knows what she holds, that he doesn’t need to see it, but Carl’s feet continue down the length of the creaking, ancient dock, worn and sagging planks struggling against the urge to give up, splinter and sink. He smells her, that scent of the last summer flower fading and bowing to the coming season of decay.

He just begins to see over her shoulder. The side of Charlotte’s face is indistinct, a faded blur, like a memory just out of reach – amorphous but obviously there. But her hands, cupped together, are clear and detailed and keeping safe something terrible. Something incredible. Something only Carl would understand. Her breathing slows as Carl eases behind her, his right hand grasping her sagging left shoulder, squeezing gently in a request – a plea – to share with him her gift.

Charlotte holds her breath as time is held by a filament as thin as spider’s silk. Carl’s own breath catches in his chest as Charlotte begins to open her hands, with intent but desperately slow. Carl’s hand strays to the nape of her neck. From that deeper part of him that always remembers rises first a tremble, growing to a curse then a scream that this time he must see what she holds, that he cannot be denied again but knows he will awaken now, against his will, without discovering his sister’s secret. Carl can nearly see it, something familiar, a thing he once held also or will yet hold. He tries to will himself forward in time but is pushing against an unseen force he cannot budge.

And he wakes.

II. Rising

Charlotte loved to fish off their dock. Strange because fishing was for boys and for men. But Carl humored his little sister. Helped her, even. Sometimes. But as much as she looked up to him, Carl was estranged, detached from her. She would find her big brother in a stare at her, breathing through his mouth, head slightly to one side, and she would wonder what he saw when he looked at her. Did he see the small girl who needed him? Did he see the pleading in her eyes? Did he hear the frantic, silent scream to help her? To protect her? When she would whisper for him to hold her, to wrap her in warm security, he would pretend not to hear. Carl had his bruises too, wore them inside and out. Charlotte’s were mostly inside.

Their father, that thing with fists, brought either feast or famine, turning, it seemed, on nothing. As fickle as the weather. His constant was his bottle. It appeared as if from vapor, full and fully formed in his hand, to his lips, out his piss and back to vapor again. A nearly empty bottle was ever-present in their father’s clawed paw, and Carl often wondered if he filled them from a hidden faucet somewhere in the cabin, a spigot that gushed a torrent of ceaseless pain.

After food and the occasional used rags he passed as clothes, the mass of their father’s meager income from odd jobs in the nearby town went to the cabin. The cabin seemed forever in need, and he attended to it assiduously, almost obsessively. Their father cared for it and spoke to it. Carl could almost hear their conversations. Some nights when Carl’s stomach clung to his ribcage, empty and dry, Charlotte’s whimper strained to be heard over their father’s hammering on a new shutter for the front window or a new patch of shingles on the roof. Both children were gaunt, whittled down to their essentials, but their father never seemed too thin and always had energy enough for a repair or a backhand.

He seemed to take nourishment from the cabin.

In time, their small one-bedroom house became the children’s dark mother and dreaded guardian that brought them torment and torture, wedded to their warlock father. It became the propulsive force that animated their abject fears. Its black magic gave Carl his bruises, and Charlotte her monster.

Carl was twelve, his sister seven, the first time the monster came for Charlotte. Carl closed his eyes and listened, face without expression, shoulders slumped, body relaxed and numbing. He licked his lower lip. He didn’t try to stop it – he wasn’t moved to interfere. Charlotte’s sobbing came through the bedroom wall and into the living room where Carl sat. Her cries soothed him. Carl was afraid and exhilarated. And guiltless.

Months washed by, gauzy motion at a distance. Charlotte suffered almost daily. The monster was brute carnality made flesh, and the cabin was complicit. Charlotte escaped into herself and her cries to Carl for help diminished. Some part of her knew her big brother had abandoned her long ago. If he had ever been there at all.

One day Carl found her fishing off the dock, her line in the brown, still water, eyes closed to the world. She wore pink flip-flops, her heels half covering a portrait of Wonder Woman ringed with double red lines. Carl stepped behind her. He reached for her chestnut tangles and began rubbing them between his thumb and first finger.

“Help me.” It was the last time she asked.

“I can’t.”

“You could.” Her tone didn’t suggest, just softly stated.

A heavy silence.

“I won’t.” He turned and walked back to the cabin.

Charlotte vanished the next day, fishing from the dock. Carl found her worm struggling on the dock, writhing around the tiny harpoon, tipping a line never cast.

That was the day the cabin began talking to Carl.

He listened.

III. Strike

It had been in his family for generations, Carl said. Their grandfather had built it after the war. Carl didn’t remember which war. Or which grandfather. He told interested parties the cabin was like family to him. For twenty-two years he had cared for it and lived in it (lived with it). The cabin wore its clichéd “one-bed, one-bath” description on the booking app with unembarrassed pride, never trying to be more than it was, but striving to live up to some unwritten cabin-in-the-woods standard: rustic, cozy and best enjoyed in the throes of autumn maroons and oranges burned. It succeeded and served Carl a living. He didn’t make much by it; he didn’t need to. The work was Carl’s reward.

Carl also owned a smaller cabin, more akin to a shack, one mile up the winding and wooded dirt road that fed his cabin and a few others scattered haphazardly around Lake Nowhere. He built it himself, to stay close to his cabin while enjoyed by renters. He only rented his cabin to guests for weekends, long or short, and checkout was always on Sunday.

His cleaning ritual hews to a line but flexes with the needs of the cabin. He will start in the bathroom, work outward from there, take his time, never hurry. Carl loves to clean, to relive. He loves Sundays and loves his cabin. And his cabin loves him.

Carl remembered that irksome rotten plank in the dock as he closed the trunk of his hatchback with his elbow, arms crooked around the green plastic tub of cleaning supplies. He needed to fix that plank before someone put their foot through it and hurt themselves. That just wouldn’t do. No, no. He eyed it briefly from a distance as he strode to the front door, his head turned slightly, and clicked his tongue in chiding reminder: next time. Goosebumps tickled his arms as he reached for the door handle, throttled by a wind that hissed across the water before licking his neck. Carl loved the anticipation of what came next.