Chapter Four

Sometime later, Ansel woke up to a sharp bang. The cabin rattled and reverberated at whatever had caused the noise. It was difficult to tell how much time had passed since he’d fallen asleep, the fire smoldering in the fireplace being the only indication of any other changes in the room didn’t tell him much of anything. The windows in the room had been greyed over from the falling snow that coated them both to the point of obscurity. And the radio had long since fallen silent. Though Ansel didn’t know when it had been off, or if he had even turned it off himself.

Another bang resounded throughout the cabin. Bang! Then another answered shortly after it. Bang!

Ansel got up and shivered. He didn’t see anyone else in the room, or anything that could have been there in the darkness. From what his senses told him, he was still alone. Though he didn’t trust his senses. They had been wrong before and that had cost him, in more ways than one.

“What in the hell is that?” He looked around to make sure the backpack was still nearby, and it was. Right where he had left it next to the corner of the couch beside him. Just in arms reach where it would stay as Ansel left it right there, and listened closely to the room.

Another series of banging noises. Bang, bang, bang! Followed by another pause.

Ansel grabbed his chipped and rusty hand shovel. Then he crept over towards the front door of the cabin, where everything was at its most darkest point. The sounds had seemed to have sounded like they had come from there, or so Ansel imagined.

Bang, bang! Bang, bang! Nearly sounded like a hammer on wood. Driving something into the wood from the rhythm.

Bang, bang! Bang, bang!

“Morning, boy!” An older man was there. He didn’t turn around to look at Ansel. In his hand was a small hammer, a board of wood was held beneath the other hand. He gruffed to Ansel, in a gravel filled voice, “Going to stand there, blocking the air, or are you going to help me fix this mess?”

Ansel stood there, frozen in place.

“Well? I don’t have all day, boy.”

He’d looked just as how Ansel remembered him to have looked. His hair thick of color and hints of grey flecked in to break up the visage of regality that he wore. His expression, a permanent scowl of something that appeared to always be disappointment.

“Are you going to keep standing there? You going to help me out here or not? This needs to be fixed, Ansel!”

He looked like something straight out of an old photograph. Timeless and stained yellow with an ageless accent that ran along to his edges. His thick red hair was full of wavy curls that came from years of working outside and in the wind. Standing beside him, Ansel could see the layered callus hands, right where the man had always had them. Heavy and full of something to keep them busy.

“I don’t understand why you broke this damn thing in the first place. What was going through that big head of yours? Was anything going on in there?”

He hadn’t aged a single day. Not a single one. What was it now? How long had it even been? Twenty years? Maybe it had been more years than that? Ansel couldn’t be sure of anything. His memory was always failing him and leading them both astray. This couldn’t be real. There was nothing to tell Ansel whether or not this man was real, or if he was even truly in from of Ansel. Let alone that he was yelling at him, as he always did.

“Was anything going on, anything at all? In that head of yours?” Then the older man sighed and shook his head, unsatisfied with the lack of an answer. Which seemed to be itself the answer that he’d expected to get in the beginning. He grabbed some more nails from the tray beside where he was kneeling and returned to hammering into the floorboards. Several wooden boards were leaning against the wall, within arm’s reach of the nails. He had one board already in place. It filled in the empty gap of the floor where Ansel had broken off a section to hold the door shut. He’d forgotten why he’d needed to do it in the first place.

It had felt important at the time. Ansel could remember that much. He’d needed the door wedged shut. Or else something bad would have happened to him. But what was it? What could it have even been? If only he could remember…

Ansel gulped at the air. He felt so small, seeing this man here of all places. After all these years, and so unchanged. It felt like something out of a forgotten memory. Something haunting and ethereal that shouldn’t be accepted as real and true, it felt so very much, “S-s-s-should, should I grab the bo-board from the door?”

The older man grunted, and then sighed. “Speak up, boy,” he grumbled. “I can’t hear you whenever you squeak like that. Always so damned quiet when you speak to me. What is it now?”

Ansel tried to remember what it had been. Something important and necessary to tell him. It was important to share, he knew that much. He’d needed to tell him or else something bad could happen to Ansel.

The thought, whatever it had even been, felt so far away now. Something he should remember, but then couldn’t…

What was it?...

“Should I grab the board from the door?” He’d squeaked out. Ansel couldn’t recognize his own voice; it sounded foreign and unused. Almost childish. And scared even.

The older man scoffed at the unsure tone, “No.! He shook his head and grabbed another nail from the tray.

Bang! Bang! Bang! The nail was driven in. The older man moved his hand with experience and confidence. A few quick taps to get the nail started, then…

Bang! Bang! Two swift drops of the hammer drove them the nails in the rest of the way. Countless hours of hammering, untold instances of crushed fingers had made his hands gruff, pudgy, and wickedly strong. Ansel remembered watching him cut things apart, making new creations in his woodshop. Or rather his workshop, he did after all have more than just carpentry things there. Ansel remembered how creative the older man became when it came to making things. Didn’t matter what it was, simply shaping wood into beautiful constructs was wonderful to see happen in measurable time. When those things could make noise and breathe life into new objects, and when the older man-
“Are you going to stand there all day?”, the older man growled again. He appeared frustrated at the growing silence in the room. “Or are you going to make yourself useful and hand me that board over there?”

“Y-y-es sir. Here you go.”

“Finally. Not that one. The other one right, yes, that one! Thank you, Ansel. I swear sometimes you’re not really there. Even where you’re standing a few feet away from me when I’m talking to you. Off in your own head. Always getting in, not only your own way, but mine as well.”

Ansel watched him drive more nails into their new respective places. All of the work a cacophony of orchestration, all of it hidden within the guise of hammers and nails.

“So. Why did you put that board by the door? I can’t figure out a good reason why you’d have gone and done it. But knowing you there is, at the very least, a reason for having done it at all. There always is at least one reason with you, Ansel.” The older man mumbled the last sentence as Ansel kept right on staring at him. His eyes wide with confusion and worry at having done something, anything, wrong. “Well? Out with it now, boy. There are things to do.”

“I, I din’t want to freeze…” Ansel felt his palms going sweaty on him. He rubbed them on the sides of his jeans, over and over. They never felt dry enough. He could feel it in his little heart, he was scared. “To death! Sir. It was cold and snowing, outside…and…”

The older man exhaled for a long time, then he groaned and creaked his legs and joints into a standing position. Finally, then he turned towards Ansel. His eyes enquired over him, making him feel very, very little and small under their heavy gaze. He sighed and said, “Had a feeling I wasn’t going to understand it very much. Look, in this day and age no one freezes to death anymore, Ansel. And if they did. Then, well. It was probably well deserved. Look, Ansel, son, you’re inside. You’re not going to freeze to death while you stay indoors. Being outside in the snow and rain, that’s what’ll do you in. And mighty quick at that. Don’t be silly now. You’ll be just fine.”

“But...” Ansel attempted to explain, to tell his side of things with more of an eloquence than he knew could be mustered within his own mind. His voice caught itself in his throat, stuck, as if in a trap that couldn’t be so easily escaped as all of that.

“But, what now? You’ve got the fire going strong over there in the fireplace. You’ve got warm clothes resting snuggly to your back. But what, Ansel? Out with it already. Come on now.”

“The snow…” Ansel attempted, “the snow was pushing the door, opened it. And I, I needed to hold it shut. I needed-”

The older man raised a hand for him to stop, “I’m going to just cut you off there, son. I don’t care what the reason actually was. It’s fine now. Let’s just, get past it. Go wash up. Your mother is finishing up dinner soon.” The older man moved the tray with nails, as well as the hammer, over by the boards leaning against the wall, before walking off towards the kitchen.

Ansel could hear the sounds of pots and pans being washed, frantically and decisively.

Clang!

Splash!

Whoosh!

The noises made him further towards nervous than at ease. He could almost smell the vapors of cooked potatoes and soup drifting throughout the building. The smells only grew stronger, more piercing, and the sounds sharpened and intensified louder as he walked into the kitchen.

Everything in the room, the entire layout, from the wooden flooring, to the ruffled curtains, the chipped table legs, and even the cobwebs at the corner of the window facing the last vestibules of sunlight that cascaded over it all, it was as he remembered it being. It was all right where they had been left for him, so long ago. The long table, unchanged, filled out the center of the room. Still covered in a rough looking white cloth fabric that had never not looked more like a dirty doily than the softest fabric he had ever known. The counter as it had always been, was lined up and covered with a wide medley variety assortment of marked and unmarked pots, bottles, jars, cans, bowls, some containers, both open and closed, all containing further various things that Ansel could only ever have guessed as to what they had been. And he remembered trying, at some point as a child to do just that.

The sink was filled on one side in a series of organized stacks of dishes, cups, and cluttered bits of silverware that were each different and of all shapes, sizes, and usages. The other side of the sink was empty, shiny, and bare off all things. The surface of it gleamed pure and clean, resting in a fresh layer of dishwater that smelled strongly of lemons, that was resting comfortably in its base.

Nothing was different here in this kitchen; it was all unchanged, unscathed by the ravages of unyielding time. All just how it had all been left from when he was a mere child. Right down to the crooked pictures hanging against the refrigerator door, some of them leaning with lettered magnets holding them up. His crude signature next to a series of family photos. Taken during a trip they had all posed for on the beach. He’d never learned the name of the beach, simply that he had hated the taste of sand. It showed in the picture itself, he made a gross face, sand trickling from his hair and nose. Below that picture a series of snapshots, all of a trip to a theme park. They had put Ansel into a rope hung bucket that dangled precariously above an open well. And little Ansel was sitting there, not looking happy about it. Nope, not looking happy at all.

Everyone looked so happy to be there. In all of the photographs, the frozen fragments of times spent in happier places. And Ansel felt so very, very small.

“Ansel, you going to sit down sometime today?” The older man glanced sharply at him, from just over the cusping edge of his newspaper. Ansel could only read the part of the newspaper that announced the words, ‘Business Section’ in black and bold fancy lettering.

“Sit down already. You’re making me nervous. Standing there, just watching everyone.”

Ansel shuffled his feet and pulled out a chair for himself. The chair was so heavy, and the scuffing noises it made being dragged across the floor were so loud. Everything felt bigger that they should have been. Yet it was all exactly as he had remembered otherwise. Down to the details of the yellowed flowers on his mother’s cooking apron. It was hanging up on a ped by the back door, where she always had left it once she was done with it. Right where she had always left it.

The woman, she was Ansel’s mother. She was over by the stove divvying up the still steaming food into four bowls. Ansel knew she wouldn’t eat anything with them. And if she did, then it would be something small, miniscule really, just a few crackers, or maybe a wedge or two of cheese. She was so young and had always appeared to have looked so frail and fragile in every possible usage of the words. Almost as if her flesh and bones had been made not only of porcelain, but of something finer than the most delicate of fine China. She had always been a stern woman too. And now she was-

“Ansel?” She asked him, without turning around. Her voice ever so much the sound of calculated frustration and focus within it. She did not sound any happier than she had ever been, “start handing out everyone’s food. I need to check on the dog.”

“Dog is fine.” Ansel’s father told her. “I checked on him after I got home.”

“Is he still outside?”

Ansel didn’t hear his father answer her, if he even did. No one said anything, not even when Ansel’s mother sighed and left the room. Her shadow being the last thing to exit after her.

Ansel went about the silent task she had given him, of placing a bowl of food on each mat on the table. Three in total. One for himself, one for his father, and one, hopefully for his mother is she had chosen to join them. Who knew what she may do in the end? She may even join them for dinner later on, before they had finished eating the first helping that they were all to share. You never knew. She was prone to making decisions long after everyone had begun doing things. And she was always crying lately.

Everyone was crying lately, now that he thought about it. Why were they-

“Ansel!”

Ansel shivered, “Yes sir?” His father’s voice frightened him without any controlled effort exerted to it. Naturally a deep and authoritative tone that commanded respect and obedience, his father’s voice always kept him on edge. Worried that he would upset the man with any sort of grievance, be it big or very small.

His father folded up his newspaper, taking great care to make it fold evenly in half. Then he set it down under his chair and sighed.

“Go check on your mother,” Ansel felt that each word was an added weight placed upon his tiny heart, “Please. She should join us for dinner and I think she would listen to you if you asked her kindly. It would do her some good.”

As Ansel walked away from the kitchen area he heard, just barely over the light rushing sounds of the wind outside, his father add, “It would do us all some good…”

It was bright outside the house. Autumn air nipped at Ansel’s hands, ears, and nose. Biting the edges of the exposed flesh, making them turn a sharp red shade in mere moments. He rubbed his hands together and walked out back, behind the building where his mother’s footprints had led off to. They, or rather his parents, had a small shed out there where the dog was kept. It wasn’t much but realistically the dog was warmer than the rest of them would be once winter was back in full swing that year.

Ansel and his brother would walk out back there sometimes. Their mother had caught them once smoking cigarettes that his brother had pinched from the convenience store around the corner from the drug store. That was where their mother had worked, at the drug store, and she would have recognized them if they had gone there. Despite the exhausted level of caution they had used, she still caught on to them somehow.

Their mother had yelled at them something fierce when she’d caught them trying to light the cigarettes. Ansel had been attempting to smoke his backwards and his brother had chewed and spat out the end of his before trying to light it. Their mother, after screaming out obscenities and threats then sent them on their way after taking all of the cigarettes from them. From what Ansel could tell though, she had never told their father about the incident. Keeping it, as well as he suspected, the cigarettes for herself.

Today proved his theory true and correct. Ansel could smell the scent of processed tobacco burning, just behind the shed he could see a trail of vapor slithering away into little fading wisps of grey from the building.

“Ma?” Ansel squeaked out. “You back there?”

His mother coughed, and began whipping away at the smoke. She hid the lit cigarette in an old tin can beside her. Ansel saw her do it, though he said nothing about it. It wouldn’t have mattered much if he did anyways. She was going to yell at him regardless of whatever he had said to her. And he knew that as a given truth.

“Come inside, ma.”

His mother shook her head and attempted to hold back a cough, “I’ll be in in a little bit. You go on ahead now and go eat, Ansel. I’m not that hungry anyways. Now go on. Get going before your father yells at you to come back inside.”

“Ma, we’re both waiting on you to eat dinner. Please…you need to eat.”

“I’ll eat,” her face contorted, and twisted around in an emotion Ansel that didn’t have any words for. She looked like an entirely whole another person that he didn’t, and couldn’t recognize, “when I am good and ready. Now, go on and get inside or I’ll tan your hide raw with a switch! Now, go on and get going!”

Ansel scurried past the dog, who gently wagged his tail before laying back down on the ground again. Ansel scampered the whole way inside, feeling his own tail was tucked between his legs.

The cabin’s door echoed out in front of Ansel as it slammed shut behind him. Wisps of snow were drifting themselves down and around him. Ansel suddenly realized that he was more than simply just cold, he was in fact now freezing, “Frank?” His eyes darted around the darkness as he instinctively rubbed his hands together, then his arms. Needed to keep moving, that way he wouldn’t freeze, those were the thoughts that went across his mind. Looked around the cabin, recognition followed with frantic concern melted onto his face as the flecks of snow were doing much of the same, “Have I been talking to myself again? Frank? Frank! Where are you, buddy? Frank?”

His right foot gave out from underneath him as he stumbled over towards the couch. He fell to the wooden ground with a rough thud! He crawled the rest of the way to the couch, he could see the silhouette of the where the backpack still was. Just beside the couch where he’d left it when he’d fallen asleep before. However long it had been. Right where he had left it for when he would wake up, if he had really woken up. His hand found the radio and he pulled it close to his chest.

“Frank!”, Ansel wheezed and fumbled around, turning the dials with cold clumsy fingers that didn’t want to obey him. Finally there was a click, breathing life back into the small radio. The static chirping was lower than it had been before. “Gotta remember, gotta remember. Check the batteries. Gotta…remember. Frank would need to use new ones soon. Some new batteries. I’ve got maybe one or two. In the backpack. If not, then he would die soon,” Ansel explained this to himself, attempting to control his frantic breathing. Everything was hurting him. Simply breathing felt like inhaling fiberglass that kept stabbing him where he couldn’t do anything to ease it or to stop it from stinging him at all. “Come on, buddy! Talk. Talk to me. Before I keep talking to myself again. I don’t know what I’ll end up doing if I keep doing it. I’m so scared, Frank…I don’t want to keep being alone…”

The radio hissed out something from a soft signal. With a slow delicate finagling of the dials Ansel was able to find a station. Or rather the fragments of one that tried to come in. And it was more than enough to cause him to exhale in relief. He wasn’t alone anymore. Someone else would talk to him. Someone he knew to have been real all along. Right when he’d needed them the most.

“Tomorrow night…we will cease…music…based…ratings, the people…so now, we’ll…talk radio…think it’s…really…” the voice narrated something that sounded like an explanation over the crackled airwaves, some sort of an answer to a problem Ansel wasn’t familiar with in the first place. Nor did he really care about any old problem at that moment. Just hearing another person’s voice, a simple piece of someone’s voice, well, it breathed more life into him than the charred remains of the fire did for his fingertips. It meant that he was not completely alone anymore. It made him feel safe, to an extent that made him feel happy again.

“Since…our…music, we’ll…right down to…next, Metallica, with Master…Puppets…”

The song began to play itself out over the small sections of frost covering the speakers. As the song played, granted it was in fragmented bits and static filled pieces, Ansel was more than certain that he had never actually heard the song before. Not even to this extent. He knew that had heard the title. The people outside of the bars he’d been around had mentioned it and called him names when he foolishly told them his musical tastes had ran a bit more, country. Not that rock music or metal, or whatever in the devil the genre ended up being for this band had been. Ansel learned not to tell people too much about himself from them, all it took is when that man with the studded gloves covering his fist had called Ansel a mean slur that he hadn’t recognized. And then when the man had punched Ansel in the face, and not just the once.

It was one lesson of many painful ones that followed along in the long line of things Ansel had been forced to learn in his life. Over the course of years life seemed to shape him into the accepting and albeit frightened man he was. But, here, and now, he could understand the allure of this song that played out for him now. And he suspected, of this band, that they sounded like they really cared about what their music became, and what it would do to people. Ansel liked to think that he was right about that. He hoped he was right. Metallica sounded like they were a cool band to listen to after all.

“…life burns faster, faster…obey your master, master…”

“Hey, Frank? What do you think they mean by that part? The ‘master, master’?” Ansel rubbed his neck. Pins and needles throughout his flesh, all entering the little bumps that speed bumped along his neck and arms. His fingers felt so cold to the touch. Too cold…

He pulled the backpack ever closer to his chest, and began to systematically go through the clutter inside of it. “Now, where, in the hell…did I,” Bottles, a couple of pans, a cluster of trash bags, miscellaneous lengths of strings and ropes, “put that…damned? Ah, there we are. Damn…frozen over too…stiff…”

Ansel placed two blue gloves next the fireplace. Though the fire was smoldering then, the log had remained warm to the touch. Ansel watched the small edges of frost sizzle and steam off of the gloves slowly. The fact that he could see them warming up in real time had given him enough confidence that they would be nice, dry, and toasty enough to wear soon. The sooner the better, from the look of his blue and greying fingers…

“Good, good. I wasn’t worried. Wasn’t worried at all, not even a little! Right, Frank? Oh, the song changed…”

The small radio rendered a static filled rendition of another song that Ansel wasn’t sure he recognized. He leaned in closer, trying to focus and listen as closely as he could. Hoping it would dawn on him soon enough. He liked it too. The melody and words sounded so darn familiar the more that he had heard of it. If only for that damned static being in the way…

“Hey. What song is that, Frank? I don’t know if I rightly know what it is. It sounds so familiar…But, I just can’t place it…It reminds me, reminds me of when I lived in Florida. Before I met you, of course. Way before, I met you…”

The sounds of traffic jams, pan handlers scurrying about, and the overbearingly general overall hot and unhappy sticky people that lived there. It all came back to Ansel, one at a time.

“I went after…after that…and I, I played at a few small bars. Heh. I loved it. Sure, it was hot and miserable. But. I loved every minute of it. Have you ever been to Florida, Frank? I don’t know if you would like it. It’s hot. With it being so warm and miserable and humid and all. You might though. Never know until you go and do something if you end up liking it at all.”

“…When you’re strange…no one remembers, your name…When you’re strange…”, the radio crooned to whoever could be listening around it. Be it Ansel or to itself, though Ansel liked to have thought that the radio was playing song jut for him. And for no one else.

Ansel smiled, and checked the gloves by the fire again. They were still soggy, though warm enough to wear now. Ansel decided to risk it and put them on. It would be far better than anything, and he could always dry them off more once his hands were warmer. All he needed was some color to return to them and he would be fine.

The gloves felt so warm against his cold flesh. A sharp ripple of warmth seemed to fill along his hands and trickled along to his elbows, then to the other points of his body. After a few more shivered filled minutes he could even feel his toes beginning to warm up as well. He felt that he was going to be okay.

Ansel coughed, and attempted to clear his throat. He spat phlegm into the fireplace. It sizzled on the fading remains of a pitiful fire that had been out for quite some time.

“I’ll be back, Frank. Keep talking to me, please. I need to find something to put into the fire. Poor little thing is going to burn out soon if I don’t find it something soon to keep it going. Once the fire goes out…I can’t let the fire go out…”

As ever and always so, the radio continued on, unabated and uninterrupted by anything in the swirling world around it. Ansel couldn’t make out what it was saying to him anymore. Simply put, the fact that he could hear it at all made him feel better. And little to nothing more was important. The better he felt, the less he would need to fight the creeping need to talk to himself. The radio would do that for him. The radio would keep making him feel safe. It made him not feel so alone and losing what little of his mind was available to him to survive in this cabin. Ansel tried to even hum along with the little that he could make out of the garbled static chirps, as he explored the few rooms of the cabin.

In the corner of the kitchen he found a small metal bookshelf that he had overlooked earlier. All of the shelves were empty and barren with nothing to coat them but a thick heavy layer of dust, though this was all he had seen at a cursory glance. As Ansel started to walk away he then noticed a small book had been abandoned behind, on the lower corner of the bookshelf.

“Normally I wouldn’t want to burn a book, let alone anything at all. But, I’m sorry little guy. I am very, very cold…And I don’t want to die from being cold…I don’t want that at all…”

Ansel took the copy of ‘1984’ and tossed it into the fireplace. He stared blankly at the poor thing not burning up, before he grabbed the firestarter once more and again, after some struggle, succeeded in a simple spart or two that took to burning the yellowed pages of the small novella. He looked on sadly as it burned up at a glacial pace, giving him a few minutes more of fire, warmth, and most of all he hoped, more life. He was so very cold, and something needed to happen before he got much colder. Ansel hadn’t noticed it then. He couldn’t feel his fingers and toes so much anymore. All he felt was the cold all around him.

“Frank?” Ansel checked the dials on the radio, adjusting the station and volume, “You’re getting a little quiet there. Need me to let you rest for a bit, Frank?”

Soft classical music was the only reply he could make out before turning the radio off and placing it back in the backpack. He stared at the fire, then watched a shadow move about the wall above him. It seemed to fizz out and fade away, just out of eyeshot of what he could see. He wondered where shadows vanished off to when no one was looking. And where did they go whenever they were looked for? Did they go anywhere where someone like him could even be able to find them.

“I’m,” Ansel felt his eyes slipping downwards now. There was little effort in fighting the weight of them. They weighed a ton, and only grew heavier with each wink and bob of his head, “I’m going to lay down now, for a bit, Frank. I’m suddenly a little tired myself. Frank, we’ll talk in a little bit. Good. Good night…”

Ansel’s breathing slowed down, and became a heavy snore. That too, over time, slowed down as well.

Soft pattering berated alongside the chipped windows, and against the walls he could make out a gentle tapping of fallen branches and twigs, these were the last things Ansel heard, before he himself, following after the radio’s example, drifted off to sleep again on the well-worn and old couch. The room hushed to a lulling murmur as he began to sleep. The sounds of the radio’s silence could be felt, though for obvious reasons they had remained unheard.

The room felt colder then, yet welcoming and safe all around Ansel. With the small gusts of warmth that came rising away from the little fire that Ansel had absently left burning before him. Nothing crept, nor did anything creep around the room as he slept. Yet Ansel’s mind was active and animated, remaining running wild and free in his dreaming filled sleep. With memories of things and places that he hadn’t seen in years. Some decades had come and gone hence since he had remembered of such things even. And all sorts of passing melodies of things that Ansel both did not recall, nor would he have been absolutely sure of having had happened at all. That is to say, frankly, if they had even happened at all for that matter being the true point of question. Let alone of contention. Words aside, Ansel dreamed of things, and people other than himself that had already stopped being alive.

Chapter Four

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