Fiction - Hollow

It had been days without reprieve. The harsh wind rolled across the countryside in a torrent of Spring thunderstorms, flooding the low ground encircling the stone cottage. The little house was perched on the highest hill for several miles, surrounded by a stretch of fields dotted by blunt boulders and peculiar outcroppings of slate-colored rock. When there were no storms, a low mist hung heavily over the grass. It seemed an eternal obstruction, keeping those on the outskirts of the cloud from peering across the meadows. By all accounts the landscape was desolate, though perhaps not uninhabitable. The occasional curl of smoke rising from the chimney on the hill was its only sign of life.

Inside the cottage, she stoked the embers with a thin, gnarled stick, sending sparks onto her skirt. Droplets of water fell into the chimney as the rain passed overhead, sizzling and evaporating in the flames. A cat meowed feebly from the shadowy corner, its yellow eyes wide and unblinking like twin lamps. She was hungry. They were hungry. But the deluge of rain had destroyed the garden. She told herself it didn't matter. The vegetables had been sickly anyway; the result of no sunlight due to the unyielding mist. Not enough to sustain one, let alone two.

It had been four months since she arrived in this place. On this hill. In this mist. Without meaning to. Each day had been etched into the surface of the small wooden table in the hearth-room. The cat had watched curiously as she made vertical scratches down its length. She only knew the number, never the month's name. She had forgotten many days ago where she had come from. And now she knew she couldn't leave. Why she knew this, she wasn't sure. A vague sense of certainty had stolen over her in the days she spent alone in thought. She had asked the cat, but he had only meowed and rubbed against her legs as if to say, "I'm sorry, but I'm stuck, too."

In her first week at the cottage, she found a cracked mirror in the cramped bedroom and was surprised to find her long red hair turning dark at the ends, her skin sallow and stretched, and her once startlingly blue eyes tinted pale gray. A trick of the light, she told herself.

Over time, however, she began to suspect the mist. The ever-present haze that seeped into every crevice of the stone house, every pore on her face, and filled her lungs so that when she breathed, she could taste the dampness in her mouth. Each time she opened the door to walk around to the garden, the vapor pressed in from all sides, compressing her chest. It was sometimes so burdensome that she was forced to abandon her attempt and retreat back indoors. It was days like this she was surprised she was able to start a fire in the grate at all. Curiously, it nearly always stirred to life. Perhaps the hearth was a vestige of an earlier, happier time when the fog hadn't existed. She couldn't say.

The mist was the entity most culpable of preventing her escape. She came to be sure of this. But as the days passed, she grew used to its presence. She stopped gazing in the mirror for fear of finding herself more gaunt and colorless than the morning before, letting her hair become more matted and wild with each passing day. She became steadily more disoriented, forgetting where she was for long expanses of time, only to wake up beside the fireplace hours later, the cat curled up next to her stomach, wondering what time it was, what year it was, what season.

Then the rain started. Drops plummeted from the sky, drumming on the roof of the little cottage without pause for days on end. And she came back to herself for a few moments when, stepping out into the pouring rain, she felt the icy beads of water strike her hands, her feet, her eyelashes. She ran down the hill through the newly-formed puddles and straight out into the field as far as she could go, stopping only when the wind picked up, lashing at her face and stinging her eyes; when the rain began to come down in sheets and thunder rumbled across the clouds. She became frightened, and struggled back through the gale to the house, where the cat soon began pawing the puddles of water she brought in through the door.