I STRETCHED AND CHECKED my phone and there were still ten minutes before my alarm was set to go off. I turned it to silent so it wouldn’t wake up the groundskeeper, Nathan, who was asleep in the bunk next to me.
In the five or so minutes where we’d both been awake in the same cabin at the same time, we’d silently agreed not to talk about the uncomfortable age gap or the subpar living standards of his shack.
I pulled the heavy curtain open to check outside. Dead flies were piled up against the dirty glass. They were stacked four high in the corners, like the survivors of the apocalyptic insecticide incident refused to believe the dead bodies were evidence that no one gets out alive. Most of the bugs were long dead—dead to the point where their already fragile wings had since turned to particles floating on angled slats of sunlight. The rest of the bodies were just dust holding shape.
The heap shifted. Something moved in the bottom of the pile and a dead bug rolled silently from the top.
From the stacks and stacks of little dead bodies, a fly crawled out. It twitched back and forth, moving so fast in such a small space that it looked like it was glitching—like everything it did was edited out and I could only see the consequence of its movements.
The bug turned in a fast semicircle, wiped at its alien face a few times, then took flight. It clattered off the glass a few times, never understanding that windows get nailed shut. But it tried and it tried, and when I thought it was going to give up and resign itself to the mountain of bodies, it flew off into the dark of the cabin.
Outside of the window, past the empty, backlit trees, the graying, shotgun-blast clouds were rimmed with gold. The pieces of sky that you could see though the black trees had a color like the clouds were melting into the blue and diluting it. It was a patchwork of pale blue fighting to be seen through branches that looked like Rorschach ink blown out of a straw.
I fumbled through the dark with my arms stretched out in front of me. Aside from tossing my bags in there the first morning, I’d only seen the inside of the maintenance bunkhouse at night. Besides the antler racks and the old-fashioned bear trap on the wall, the only thing I knew about the interior was that it was cold and that Nathan slept with extra blankets that only served to overheat him and make him stink with night sweat.
Hugging my towel and body wash against my chest with my left hand, I dragged my free hand along the wall until I found the only door other than the front entrance.
It was dark in the quarters but stepping on the cold tile floor of the windowless bathroom felt like stepping on midnight, like the tiles were colder and sharper and more immediate than the cold of Nathan’s weird little apartment. Wading into the infinite void of the bathroom made the dark of the quarters look gray, and if I could’ve seen anything, I probably would’ve seen my breath.
I tried the light switch at the door but it didn’t do anything other than make a dry snapping noise each time I flicked it up or down. The potential heat of the shower outweighed staggering around in the dark and trying to keep both feet off the ground as much as possible.
After the shower sputtered and hissed to life, I realized it had two settings: boiling hot or off. I felt around for another knob but there was only one handle in the center of the tiny, coffin-shaped shower stall.
At first I just leaned forward with my hands against the wall, letting the water hit the top of my head while I stared into the nothingness in front of me. I stood there until the air around me began to change—until the air got thick and warm and when I turned around, the water poured down around my collarbone, covering the puckered spot of scar tissue above my heart.
When I couldn’t stand it anymore because it felt like the water was going to wash me away, I crouched down and wrapped my arms around my knees. The searing water hit the back of my neck and my shoulders. I moved my head up and let the water wash down my face and around my eyes, pooling in the small cup where my arms hugged my knees like a baby in a strange womb.
It was too dark to see the water but it was impossible not to feel it because, despite the lack of light and despite the expanse of freezing tile, there was undeniable heat in the blackness and I was slowly waking up.