The Kind of Grief That's Empty
Short Story, March 2021
Caroline pulled the keys from the ignition, and the abrupt absence of the rumbling engine left only her breathing to fill up the silence. The cabin staring back at her was silent, too, but it never made much noise other than the occasional settling of its walls in the lonely late afternoon. As a child, she visited the cabin frequently with her grandparents, and it had since been left in her care.
There was a dog on the front porch, bathing in the sun. Brown spots freckled his white fur, and he lifted his head off the ground to see if she was going to upset his nap.
She opened the car door and stepped out, deciding she would unpack later because she was no longer able to approach the cabin. Instead, Caroline rounded the back of the car and walked into the forest.
The Northwoods of Wisconsin rivaled the beauty of tropical destinations not because it had blue skies and white sand— though there were thousands of lakes, many of which had clear water. The Northwoods were beautiful because they exuded character and wisdom and numinosity. The trees, with their sky-bound branches and seasonally-shifting forms, dampened external noise and echoed inner thought.
Caroline wandered through the supposedly introspection-inducing trees. She didn’t study the lower trunks covered in yellow-green moss, nor did she savor the crisp snapping of twigs under her boots. With her hands in her pockets, she put one foot in front of the other, letting her eyes become glassy. The Northwoods had indeed echoed her inner thought; emptiness had become oblivion.
The setting sun eased her out of her prolonged trance. It was necessary to return to the cabin if only because she couldn’t see her hand inches from her face. Upon her arrival back, she unpacked the car, towing her single suitcase through the front door. Its wheels skipped over the threshold.
The cabin hadn’t changed on the inside, but then again she hadn’t expected it to. There were antique fishing poles and maps still hanging beside the fireplace and photo magnets still canvasing the fridge which you could only know was black from the exposed handle. The embroidered towels hanging over the handle of the stove hadn’t moved, and the mounted trophy buck hadn’t turned his head.
She crossed the dining room and opened the door to the smallest of the three bedrooms. It was the one she’d shared with her brother as a kid, and she saw no benefit in straying from tradition.
She set her suitcase on the end of the bed, unzipping it to take out her laptop. This trip was meant to cure her writer’s block so she could finally finish her novel. She’d been stuck on the same scene for a while as she was unable to write anything past a sentence before holding down the backspace key.
Caroline quickly lost hope, the little black line blinking at her as she sat at the open laptop. Despite the change in scenery, her absence of thought was still present. It was as if the blank white page on the screen mirrored the one in her mind.
She closed her laptop, not moving from the desk for a few minutes. She supposed a good night’s rest in an unfamiliar bed without the interruption of an alarm or rush hour traffic might help to alleviate her block.
The bed needed to be made though, and with a small sigh, Caroline slid the closet open. She randomly selected a set of moose-patterned sheets from the top shelf and a plush navy blanket from the one below that, then set them both on the bed before turning around again to slide the door shut.
As she nudged it closed, a dog bed on the closet floor caught her attention.
Caroline held the closet shut for a few moments, breathing in her exhaled air again as it bounced off of the wooden surface in front of her.
She moved her suitcase to the floor so she could stretch the sheets across the bare mattress. Once all four corners were secure, she wrapped the navy blanket around herself and crawled into bed, and it was likely a sore sight: a queen-sized bed too big for one human with their knees tucked to their chest, leaving plenty of room at the foot of the bed.
Caroline slept poorly that night. She rolled around every which way in the empty space, threw the blankets to the floor, picked them up again minutes later, and tucked her head under the pillow, only to repeat the process several times before the sun came up.
As she rose from the bed, the cabin was eerily quiet. Pale sunlight seeped in between the blinds, casting an offish glaze on the mood of the living space. Caroline avoided the shapes of light on the floor as she slugged to the cabinet in the kitchen where she kept her mugs. She stood in front of the coffee maker while it heated up the water.
She avoided eye contact with the front door and the leash that hung beside it.
The coffee maker beeped at her and started to produce a dark, steaming liquid which splashed against the bottom of her mug. A few droplets landed on her hand still holding the handle, surprising her only to the point of releasing her grip.
She didn’t add her usual vanilla creamer nor let the coffee cool down before she brought the mug to her lips. It was too hot to taste, but it woke her up so she drank it, not leaving the counter.
Caroline lost track of how long she was sipping on her coffee, staring into the cabinets, but she disregarded her lost time as she set the empty mug in the empty sink when she finished.
She would try to write again today. She told herself she would write something and, whether or not she liked it or if it was good, she wouldn’t delete it. That was probably a lie.
Caroline grabbed her laptop from the desk in the bedroom and carried it to the back porch. There, she sat on the deck overlooking the lake and frowned at the blinking black line. She watched it blink almost as if anticipating it to stray from its usual blinking pattern. It didn’t, or at least not in the entire hour she loitered at the keyboard.
So she loitered into the forest instead.
The trees weren’t any different than the day before, but then again Caroline hadn’t really awarded them enough of her attention to be able to notice. She couldn’t know if she had taken a similar path through the woods as yesterday or even if they were the same woods at all. In the forest, she was a prisoner of her own hollow mind with no will to escape. She put one foot in front of the other, the shackles around her ankles clattering for only the introspective trees to hear.
Eventually, she found herself back at the cabin, unaware of having turned around but nevertheless unbothered. She supposed it was due time to fuel her body with food and water, anyways.
Caroline cooked the same dinner she cooked every other night the past week but this time opted for an actual plate instead of a paper one because she already had another dish to do. She carried her meal to the dining table and sat on the side facing away from the window, readying her fork to stab into her dinner.
The fork scraped the plate, its metal screeching across the ceramic. Caroline set it down and rose from the table, not having eaten a single bite. She wasn’t hungry. She wasn’t anything these days. Caroline was empty.
The dog bowls were empty, too.
She stared at them for a while.
She picked up both bowls and made her way down to the lake, tossing one, then the other as far as she could.
The spotted dog wasn’t far behind. He splashed into the water after the bowls, but they were already sinking. The dog dove under the water, desperate to retrieve the bowls like a game fetch.
Caroline waded in after the dog, forcing her feet through the heavy water. She called out after him in an attempt to get him to come back, and she wondered for a moment if he could hear her in that dark, cloudy unknown.
The lake floor fell away from her feet. Caroline started to tread water to stay afloat, kicking her legs and arms slower as she neared the spot where the dog disappeared. He still hadn’t surfaced.
She waited above the water and tilted her chin toward the sky. It was a stagnant gray— not enough clouds to rain, not dark enough yet to break. Caroline wanted to break out of her pale gray state, but that would mean letting in all of the heaviness first.
The spotted dog wasn’t going to swim back up.
Caroline relaxed her arms, then her legs. She stopped fighting.
Drowning was always portrayed with a slow descent away from the light, but Caroline couldn’t stop thinking about that flawed characterization as she immediately sank down under the water. It pulled her down so fast, so much darkness grabbing her at once. She opened her eyes and welcomed the soft sting in exchange for vision.
The lake was consumingly deep, swallowing her in its murky abyss. Silt floated around in the water because she had disturbed it. There was no spotted dog, and the empty-like-her-thoughts silver bowls were long since buried at the bottom. How quickly they must have sunk, she thought, when they could not swim.
Her lungs started to hurt— something of which Caroline was only vaguely aware.
She pondered if this was death: sinking into the darkness, no longer fighting or breathing or seeing the spotted dog. Alone. A bit cold, too, but not a shivering cold. Cool sheets on skin cold. Maybe Caroline died months ago. How long had she let herself merely survive instead of pursuing life?
That was a dumb question. She knew she could pinpoint it to the day, probably the exact moment. It was when she walked away from the spotted dog with his closed eyes. She would see him again in places where he used to be, but he would never see her again. He was in the murky, cool-sheets-on-skin cold dark. And that broke something so deep down she didn’t know it was there until it was shattered, the serrated pieces cutting into her insides every fucking day since.
Caroline hit the bottom of the lake.
There was no spotted dog down there.
And there never would be.
She looked up, the cloudy grey sky now replaced by little shapes of filtered light dancing on the surface.
But there would be up there.
She began to fight her way back out the other side of that darkness. With each movement of her restrengthened limbs, the light at the top, though still distant and dull, grew closer. Her lungs protested at the lack of fresh air, but Caroline relished the burning because she was feeling.
She crashed through the surface of the water, gasping for breath and life and taking it all in to fill the emptiness that had lived in her body for so long. She swam toward the shore, and by the time she collapsed in the sand, the sky was weeping for her.
She pushed herself off the ground, running through the rain to reach the cabin. Her clothes stuck to her skin the same way her hair was clinging to her scalp, her entire being thoroughly drenched in water. Peeling off her wet t-shirt was therapeutically liberating, and she wasted no time in sitting in front of her computer, fingertips skipping over the backlit keys.
The next day, Caroline resolved to take a third walk through the woods, having sent the completed draft of her novel to her editor earlier that morning. The trees of the Northwoods welcomed her newfound sense of acceptance, amplifying her remembrance and contentment to outshine those painful shards of grief that won’t ever quite go away.
Upon her arrival back, Caroline repacked the car and locked up the cabin. After turning the keys in the ignition, she noticed a dog on the front porch, bathing in the sun. Brown spots freckled his white fur, and he lifted his head off the ground to watch her drive away.