Hiking through the woods in the near dark now, Gwendolyn knew these woods just as well as in the pre-war daylight. Ethan, her missing husband, would take her on walks through the woods surrounding their home on many occasions. Romantic walks when he was on leave, he would build her a small, cozy campfire where they would make love.
Here and there, Gwendolyn passed by a memory, or a familiar barkless tree, knowing she was navigating accurately back home. “Here, we’re stopping real quick to rest, honey. But not for long.”
Chloe gazed down into her bucket as she sat onto a fallen tree and Gwendolyn noticed. “No drink! Not yet, sweetie!”
“But mommy, I’m so thirsty!”
Gwendolyn was proactive and had left candles lit in every window of their cabin, giving the impression it was occupied. “Home! Mommy it’s home!”
Ascending the front, sooty steps, and into the heavenly glow of the candlelight, Chloe rushed in and placed her bucket onto the kitchen table. Gwendolyn setting her’s onto floorboards beside the threshold of the open front door, she slammed the door shut, deadbolting it.
Ethan had been a survival expert and his knowledge clearly passed onto Gwendolyn. She had a water filtration system set up in the kitchen and then afterwards the water would be boiled in the hearth. After some time, when the water cooled, they would fill their tummies.
“Chloe, grab your favorite book and we’ll cuddle before the fireplace.”
Chloe reached onto the bookshelf and chose: Chloe’s Secret Valentine. A book her father and mother had found online before the war, a story of a child receiving a secret valentine that turns out to be from mommy and daddy.
Upon snuggling on the couch before freshly lit logs, Gwendolyn had pinched all the candles, the roaring fire before them giving sufficient light. And upon opening the cover page, Chloe’s eyes rolled up to her mother’s as she asked sorrowfully, “where’s my other valentine, mommy?”
Gwendolyn brushed a loose strand of hair out of Chloe’s eyes and answered, “your daddy’s a soldier honey, he’ll come back to us. We will be right here waiting, baby.” Gwendolyn said what had to be said.
As the hours passed, in a time now where bedtime no longer existed, Chloe snored softly on Gwendolyn’s lap, her book open to a page where her secret valentines were revealed, mother and father embracing their child, the page index lined with candy hearts. Gwendolyn gazed into the dying flames as the living room dimmed. And dimmed another dark day.
Hours further passed. Gwendolyn’s eyelids had finally become anchors in a teary sea of memories. On the threshold of sleep, Gwendolyn mumbled, “babe, you better come back… come back to us.”
Then, on the threshold of a new dismally lit day, a whisper creeped in through one if the living room windows, which Gwendolyn had by misfortune of having too much to handle since the loss of her husband and her society, forgot to completely shut it. “Hello?” A young man’s voice whispered in. “Open your eyes.”
Gwendolyn’s eyelids fluttered but did not rise. Chloe’s eyelids snapped open, and with rapidity, aimlessly fleeted about the room until the fixated on the parted window.
“Come here little girl.”
Chloe was as intrigued as any little child would be by something so seemingly nothing.
“Come here little girl, I have candy,” the young man’s voice kept softly spoken. Chloe carefully sat her self up and slid onto the floorboards. Tiptoeing across the smoldering cherries of the fireplace, Chloe was facing the light, frigid breeze through the parted window. Chloe pivoted to her mother and appeared to about to call her to awaken her. Then the voice now more robust, “little girl, don’t do it, come to the window, I have candy and food!”
Chloe did not awaken her mother, rather, slowly turning back towards the parted window, noticing the screen had also been lifted, Chloe brought eyes up into the window and the chilly breath of a gust made her wince, her eyelids squeezing shut.
“Reach your hand through the window.”
Without a pause, Chloe lifted her hand until it rested on the sill.
A dirty, man’s hand slithered over her’s.
Then, as if lightning had struck the very window before her eyes, the glass planes shattering, and thunder so intense it deafned poor Chloe. When coming to, Chloe opened her eyes in trepidation to see the smoking barrel of her father’s pistol, and it her mother who was grasping it without tremble. And then Chloe made out red splatter over her mother’s face. Chloe instinctively rubbed her own face and off came the same crimson-colored, copper tasting liquid.
“Chloe! Get to the hiding spot!” Her mother roared.
To be Continued…
