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MidReal Story
Riley shows up in Frost Lake , Alaska , claiming
Anonymous
Apr 27
Scenario:Riley shows up in Frost Lake, Alaska, claiming that Asher Thompson is the father of her baby and he has no recollection of their encounter, leading to confusion and tension within the Thompson family.
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I ducked through the door of my cabin, shutting it behind me to keep the cold out.
I might be in the Alaskan wilderness, but that didn’t mean I was roughing it.
I’d spent more than enough time living in the wilds while I was growing up.
I was going to have a few comforts now that I had a choice in the matter.
I shrugged out of my coat and hung it on the pegs by the door, then toed off my boots next to them and slipped into a pair of moccasins.
My father would have been appalled at the lack of proper decorum, but I wasn’t my father, and I didn’t give a damn.
The cabin was small, but it had everything I needed—mainly, a bed, a kitchen table, and a wood-burning stove that kept me warm and allowed me to cook.
It didn’t have running water—there was an outhouse about fifty yards away—but I was close to one of the best fishing spots on Lake Frost, so I was never short of water to boil for dishes or myself when needed.
It was a little primitive, but I liked it that way.
When I’d first brought Riley here, she’d called me a caveman.
Maybe she wasn’t wrong, but cavemen knew how to survive, and that was all I really cared about.
It had taken some getting used to—particularly when the thermometer dropped fifty below—but I liked this life now.
It suited me, and if my family couldn’t understand that, then it was their loss.
I moved across the room to the small kitchen area where I kept a hotplate.
I switched it on, then turned back to the pantry where I had a pot of beef stew simmering on the top shelf.
The beef had come from a moose I’d hunted earlier in the month.
The potatoes were from a friend who had a garden not too far away, and the carrots were left over from what Riley had brought with her after she left.
I kept a small freezer outside so I could store food through the winter, but for the most part, I lived off the land.
Some people took offense at that, called it freeloading.
But I’d paid my dues, and I didn’t mind a little charity when it came my way.
Besides, my life was so simple that it took very little to get by.
Most of the time I was too busy hunting or fishing or cutting wood for my stove to think too hard about what I was eating.
I liked it like that.
Especially now that I was alone.
The silence of the cabin pressed in on me, but I didn’t mind.
There were so many other sounds in the world that it was nice to have some time without them.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
But even as I moved around the cabin, preparing my food and settling down at the table by myself with my book, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was something missing from my life.
There had been too much silence over the past couple of years since Riley left.
Too much quiet solitude.
