Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Spring Thaw Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

SPRING THAW

Cody Etkin hid in the backseat under a sickly smelling blanket. That scent had become his scent. The road’s condition took on a gradual downgrade over the half hour since Celeste Etkin turned left off Highway 37 and onto Boulder Avenue.

In every direction, green and brown nothingness, the trees and mountains, it all brought new and fresh tears to Celeste’s eyes. She snapped her lids against the wetness.

She deserved this for what she’d done.

Cody deserved better.

The closed eyes played strobe flashes of memories very much like an old-time penny show. Amy’s dead wet gaze directed to the ceiling, her horribly rosy cheeks and bluish lips.

Panic shook Celeste and she fought against crying out—I take it back! I take it back! A whine left her throat, but no more. She had Cody to worry about yet.

Cody was sick. He was as sick as Amy was. Losing them both would be unbearable.

—

The fever ran lava. Cody slept and Amy screamed, non-stop for three days. Stressed and wrought, Celeste managed with what she had and what she knew.

Single mothers cope, it’s what they do.

Some have better training, born to good parents, and some do not, are not.

The father of her first child was in the ground and the father of the second was in the wind. But she’d coped. Celeste was an assistant to the daycare coordinator, a good job with benefits and the plan was to return to her spot after the maternity leave. She’d had that job since Cody was three.

Cody didn’t remember his dad. That was easier on them both.

Amy had screamed and screamed and screamed, small and red-cheeked. The children shared a room while they were sick. A temporary arrangement so Mom could sleep.

That room reeked of sweat and green/yellow baby shit. Almost as if that color carried an actual scent. The doctor prescribed Baby Aspirin and rest. Amy screamed at the illness. Cody was quiet, but on fire. Nobody got enough rest.

The lack of sleep in Celeste’s schedule had her playing doctor and patient. There’s only ever so much room in any budget for drugs—Ambien boxes teased her daydreams.

Days of screaming and nights of screaming, endless hours packed one over the other. In the closet was an affordable tranquilizer and she twisted the red cap from that cheap bottle of clear liquor. Hi-C and Smirnoff, like a high school kid sneaking from her parents’ cabinet.

She sipped listening to her baby wail, felt her son’s forehead, drink in her free hand. Cody’s fever rode high, but it hadn’t moved into ER visit territory, not yet anyway.

The boy had watched his mother through squinted eyes. The screams didn’t trouble his sleep until the third night. He came in and out as if existing on a slow-motion piston. The cries seemed to fill the entire world.

“Please, baby, please, baby.” Cody heard his mother say. She was like a pale angel over his sister’s crib. “Please, baby, please, baby.” Cody wanted to smile as his mother, a god in his world, wielded a cloud in her hands. “Please, baby.”

Cody fell away into the hot spring burning within.

Dim outside, Cody got up to piss. It came out painfully and it made him want to cry. Amy was quiet and he recalled his mother moving the clouds from the sky to fix his sister with a piece of Heaven.

Across the room, slow-footed, Cody stepped to the crib. He walked with his hands down his pants for comfort, cradling his genitalia as the wooden crib cradled his little sister. The railing felt frozen against his arms as he leaned in to look.

Not a cloud, but a pillow, and on her face. He moved it. The red rode atop a blue lake, her lips bobbing above the surf, into the air. Two crimson, scabby lily pads for cheeks. Her eyes rested partially open, wider than a crack. He didn’t like the way they looked at him, all pink and weird.

At least she’d stopped crying.

Cody went back to bed and slept until his mother rocked him awake. A whine came into his throat—he needed more sleep—but it all went away with the promise of McDonald’s drive-thru. Inside he was sour not hungry, but the idea carried weight.

She packed bags, told him to pick his two favorite toys. He chose his bear, Stewart, and his Game Boy.

They got to the drive-thru. Amy was so quiet. The baby seat was there and covered, but she didn’t move. That cloud had fixed her.

—

She’d only meant to do it enough to make her sleep. Discovering that she’d killed her baby kicked Celeste’s survival skills into gear. She had a brother. They’d lost touch over the years. He was a wayward child turned criminal in manhood. He told Celeste of a hideaway camp. She agreed to call him back after he made some calls. The camp was empty and isolated, an hour away from a town called Dease Lake, off an old logging road. Minutes from the Yukon, only hours from Alaska.

“Thanks, Charlie,” Celeste said into the Bell Telephone booth’s grimy receiver.

Eventually someone would find the body and link the absence, but Celeste had time. Her brother didn’t want to know where she put the body, knowing where she’d hid was bad enough if dominoes ever started to teeter.

Change your hair, change your makeup, change your clothes, change your car, change your name, he’d told her. Be someone new, if the body never turns up then you can be a whole different person.

Celeste ordered McMuffins from the steel intercom. The woman working the window saw the sadness in the mother’s eyes. She broke a rule and handed over a Hot Wheels monster truck, though neither ordered a Happy Meal.

Cody took a few bites and felt warmth, a flash of hot gas bubbling in his belly. The internal spring was brimstone. He moaned and gave his mother his sandwich. She tilted his seat back. He rolled the monster truck on his knee. Once asleep, the truck fell and landed in the plastic pocket groove of the car door. Gone forever.

Celeste hit the drug store, the grocery store, and finally the Zellers department store. She called her brother from a payphone outside a Mac’s Milk. The tears returned as she listened. He knew a guy that knew a guy, said he’d trade the Pontiac and five-hundred bucks for an old Jeep with new plates.

Much of the money earmarked for the upcoming rent.

“G’luck, sis,” he said and hung up.

The sky overhead was grey and cool. “God save me, please,” she moaned and sobbed, the receiver still in hand.

—

Cody opened his eyes and glanced through the window before closing his eyes again. He awoke long enough outside Quesnel to eat some cold fries and an Aspirin. He looked and saw the backseat empty, saw a different backseat altogether.

Celeste watched his curious gaze from the corner of her eye. His expression was kind of scary. She sobbed and pounded the steering wheel of the shaky gas-guzzling Jeep.

They drove into the dark and parked outside a grocery when she could drive no more. She lay back after feeling Cody’s forehead.

“Mom, I got to pee,” his weak voice said.

—

Celeste awoke to morning around her—time for breakfast. Cody shivered, but he remained warm, and was getting better. She started the vehicle and continued northwest, stopping on the roadside after finding no fast food available. She fixed two peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches. The strawberry patches on the white bread reminded her of dead baby cheeks.

Her breath tightened, came only in sips, and her chest threatened hyperventilation. Cody watched her until she loosened and handed over a sandwich.

Between bouts of sorrow and self-pity, Celeste felt her son’s head. He was hot again, hotter than before, the dimming temperature nothing more than the calm before the storm.

Hours on the endless mountain roads. Celeste placed a ball cap over her head and fetched coffee and doughnuts from a truck stop, thinking that if she had something fun for her son, he might come out of this okay. She needed him to come out of it soon…or not at all.

Limbo was worse than hell. The Catholics got it wrong. Purgatory should be on the bottom.

—

She drove at just below the legal speed limit. Hours dragged and Cody woke hungry. Celeste felt his forehead and cried, the sad tears accompanied by short-lived, but hopeful tears. Cody munched three doughnuts before the awful pain came back into his guts.

Dirty outhouses popped up along the highway every fifty or sixty minutes. The karmic luck of the hopeless; it was nearly forty minutes of stinky driving before Cody peeled away his underwear and pants, both smeared with the green/yellow stains of sickly evacuation.

That stinking, sick color resurfacing like an omen.

Cody, clean and changed. Celeste hovered over the toilet next to the boy. The reek in the outhouse was incredible, worse than the sick, and Cody ran outside.

This is where we all end up someone had scrolled on the wall in black marker, below it, scratched into the paint, another user suggested, speak for yourself dickhead. There was more, something for every few feet of wall, a canvass of the everyman and everywoman. Celeste couldn’t stay to read anymore in that putrid stench and used a one-ply ticket to wipe away piss droplets.

—

The car wasn’t where it should’ve been after he came out of the toilet. He set off to find it.

“Cody!”

He heard his mother, but it was so far away. His feet stumbled on the dusty gravel and he wanted to rest more, he felt impossibly weak, but the car was nowhere.

“Please, baby! Cody, please!”

He heard that and spun around. He was on the shoulder of the highway, but his mother, like the Pontiac, had disappeared.

A truck barrelled past and a gust of wind shoved him backward. He spun again, looking for anything familiar. He’d lost everything, the car, his mother, his sister, the apartment, his Gameboy, everything!

The treeline had only obscured his view. The toilet was there and so was Celeste. Not far.

His heart raced and he cried out.

—

Celeste heard the call and ran where the forest’s edge butted against the gravel of the parking lot.

There he was, her last reason to endure. Anger rode behind the relief when she found him.

That was almost it. No son, no reason.

Tears came heavy and she hugged his little body, still warm. She squeezed, thinking that if she held tight enough it might still all go away. Three small steps to the left, out in front of a logging truck, and it would all go away.

“Mom, that hurts,” Cody muttered into her chest.

Hand-in-hand, mother and son returned to the vehicle. “You never leave my sight again, got it?”

Cody nodded. He didn’t mean to go.

They rolled. For hours. Celeste worried that she’d taken the wrong road, worried that she’d strand them on the highway without fuel, but eventually it was there, small and unimpressive.

—

Celeste instructed Cody to hide on the floor in the back, under a blanket. He caught the severity in his mother’s voice and obeyed without question. Beneath the blanket, Cody again registered the empty backseat, which meant an absence of Amy. He listened to a man speak through the window, listened to his mother keep the conversation brief, a metallic rumble, liquid flowing, and then the engine came back to life. The road grew rougher and rougher. The stones and clunky bumps were hard on his ears.

Sick to my ears, he thought under the blanket.

Celeste beckoned Cody back to his seat in time to view the old logging road.

—

Celeste hadn’t known nowhere until she passed by Dease Lake. Had to have Cody next to her to face it. Tree branches slapped against the windows. The route slimmed down to a sinister trail. Twenty-five minutes after turning onto the logging road, Celeste pulled up to a rusty gate, the better part of a no trespassing sign dangled on fencing wire.

Celeste got out. She left her door open to make for a quick and easy retreat. The gate groaned and creaked, flakes of rust rubbed into dust on her palms. She opened it just far enough to drive through. Swung it shut after.

They came upon a clearing, a cabin rose amidst the long grass—combed sideways by winds. Behind it was another building and next to that, an even smaller building, all were of aged wood, darkened and mossy. The roofs were rusty orange steel.

—

“What’s this?” Cody asked.

Celeste informed him that it was home.

He mulled it for a time and asked over Amy.

Celeste didn’t answer and said, “Let’s check out the inside.”

It looked much like the outside suggested. A big black wood stove, a big black pipe running out through the ceiling. A battered yellow couch sat against a wall below a boarded window, a windup radio on the sill. A bed sheet hung on a bit of clothesline that ran the length of the room, separating bedroom from living room. A small cot against the wall opposite the couch, a dirty blanket and pillow atop the cot. A bookshelf stood behind the cot. Past the couch was a table and shelves, the shelves sat vacant but for a few mismatched plates, mugs, and a tall plastic cup holding mismatched silverware. Cabinets covered the back wall, a sink sat in the middle, no taps, just drainage through a pipe into the ground.

Sixteen feet from one side to the other and another twelve feet in length made up the entirety of the interior. It smelled of sweetness and mold, as if there was something rotten in the cabin, about the cabin.

Celeste took Cody’s hand and led the way to a door a few feet beyond the cot and bookshelf. It screeched, wood on wood, disturbing the everyday life of a fat black spider that scurried into a crack.

There was a path to the other buildings. Buildings made to match the master. The first was a small outhouse. It smelled like the outdoors, of wood and cleanliness. A plastic seat rode a wooden bench, falling away into a hole. Next to the seat was a copy of Playboy from September 1984. Celeste dropped the magazine down into the long-dried shit and piss.

The final building was almost half the size of the main building, the top six inches of wall vented out. It smelled as the outhouse had. Wood, chopped and piled rounded the room, the handle of a small steel shovel sat next to a dusty coffee can, the mouth dipped into a hole beneath a large steel trough. The hole fell below the wooden floor, bricks lined the hole to keep the building from coming down with a bath-fire.

Celeste stepped outside and cried again.

Cody rubbed her back. “Amy must be feeling better, huh? No more screaming. Where is she?”

“We’ll unload the car and then fix you something to eat.” Celeste wiped tears from her eyes.

Cody hadn’t realized he was hungry until his mother said something.

After damp tuna fish sandwiches, Celeste searched the room, making a mental list. There was an open well at the back of the property, that solved the water question, but she needed to know what else would carry mother and son on for a while. Cody played his Game Boy.

Celeste thought that she’d need to limit his playtime, she had only eighteen-hundred dollars—maxing two credit cards she never intended to pay off—to last them indefinitely. Batteries were expensive.

After fetching the slimy water bucket from the well and dying her light hair dark, Celeste said goodbye to her son. He didn’t seem to care, already dozing in front of the grey box, while leaning sideways on the dumpy couch.

Back to Dease Lake.

Three hours before she returned. It had dimmed and she found her son shivering under a blanket on the couch, hiding from any number of monsters. She lit several candles, offered a flashlight, and brought inside the remainder of what she’d purchased from town.

—

Life was slow. Sometimes they wound the radio for the country and pop hits of yesterday and today, and weather warnings. The music grew old and mother and son took turns reading aloud from the shelved books. Cody played his Game Boy one hour a day, complained about it for several more. He didn’t understand and wanted to go back to the apartment in Vernon. Could plug in the Game Boy in Vernon. He continued to ask about Amy until Celeste finally explained that she’d died.

The explanation came amid racking sobs.

Cody never asked over it again. He was only seven, but he knew to avoid things to keep his mother from crying.

Celeste explained the nature of their new lives. If anyone figured out her identity, or his, they might steal him away and put her in jail. A scary thought.

—

Winter came and the world howled through the cracks in the walls and around the doorjambs. They made do with the cans in the cupboard until an early rain offered a ten-hour window of freedom, clearing enough snow that the Jeep might venture through the forest.

After that, they stayed put, outside only when tromping through the new snow to the outhouse, to the bathtub, or just out to offer a scream beyond the walls.

Cody liked that game, go outside and scream at the stupid snow and trees.

Mother became teacher and son resumed his studies. Mother became hairdresser, entertainer, lumberjack, and friend. Son fell off into his own world much of the time, he and Stewart the bear. Adventurers of imagination beyond the Game Boy. Places beyond mothers and wooden walls, smoky woodstoves and snow.

Celeste lost the will to teach.

Animals paraded the yard, looking in through the zoo windows to see the strange creatures in a nearly natural habitat. Runaway Humans Exhibit.

The spring, fall, and summer were all too short, winter came back, winter came back and the scent of enduring really started to stink. Waking dreams of smothering Cody, as she had Amy, filled Celeste with dread.

Every morning she woke, coming to terms with the final day of her life, the final day of Cody’s life, and every night she cried herself to sleep listening to a boy hold conversations with a stuffed bear. Nonsensical things.

Spring came early and saved their lives.

Cody was too tall for all of his clothes and his pants no longer fit. Mother gave son a pink nightshirt to wear. His skinny legs shot out below like two birch trees, his flesh so pale it appeared almost grey. Celeste thanked the god-of-minute-favors that she’d broken the mirror the first month of their stay.

Leaving her son behind at first chance, Celeste drove to Dease Lake. There was big news, a mysterious infant corpse in a baby seat washed up down south, most of the flesh nibbled away, but enough remained buckled in to prove a dead child.

Celeste felt scrutinizing eyes where there were none. She was just another skinny woman in rough attire. Not so uncommon in those parts. Dease Lake was thick with people hiding out.

Cody got two new pairs of pants, four new shirts, a pair of sneakers, and two four-pair packs of underwear, all left plenty room to grow. The wad of cash was down to under a thousand.

Summer brought about brighter days and mother decided to make an attempt, to push forward as teacher. She moved onto the world’s tougher topics. Cody didn’t understand. His reading fumbled and bumbled. He was a miserable student and she was a miserable teacher.

She gave up when Cody stated that Stewart didn’t think education was necessary.

The bear was right.

For the coming months, like a game, Celeste tested Cody’s memory. He remembered little bits. He remembered things she wished he’d never witnessed. He remembered people as if just totem poles, stiff and jutting tall into the skyline of reality, but never really a part of life.

The world was the cabin and the woods.

Beyond the yard was where he dare not go. Beyond the yard was where the evils looking to steal mothers and sons lurked.

—

Celeste cried often. It wasn’t something Cody noticed anymore.

Winter was always around the corner, bringing with it dread and despair. The snows came, but rain offered the option of now or wait until April. Celeste said goodbye and raced into Dease Lake, she treated herself to a meal of a burger and fries. She ate while she carted back ice cream and cake, sleeping pills and vodka.

Cody had no idea it was his birthday, but he shovelled the cake into his mouth, shovelled the ice cream, stalled for a brief headache, and then continued shovelling. Downing the cake, ice cream, and sleeping pills.

The vodka went away much as the sweet treats had, but burned where the ice cream froze. A half-pint bottle wasn’t nearly enough to enjoy the glow. It was all she bought, chasing down all the sleeping pills that Cody didn’t eat.

She cradled the empty bottle, “Please, baby, please, baby,” reliving the accident for the millionth time.

Celeste got into bed. Cody crawled onto the couch. Celeste swam off into oblivion, peacefully. Cody’s stomach fought the surf, the cake and ice cream, the overindulgence of it all. Cody vomited every bite back onto the floor, keeping only bits of the sleeping pills inside. He woke the following morning. Celeste slept. Her eyes seemed open a gap, a white ring around her lips. Celeste did not wake for lunch, supper, bedtime, breakfast, lunch, or supper.

Cody lived as he had, ate and drank. He spoke much to Stewart. It wasn’t until after a week of Celeste’s stillness that Stewart suggested a dead mother.

She just lay there, staring through the cracks.

“Mom, blink. Blink, Mom. Blink!”

Nothing. Dead.

Suddenly too quiet, he’d wind the radio and dance with Stewart, but Stewart didn’t like the way she stared at them. Cody agreed, he stopped dancing and stared back at her low-lidded gaze.

Winter raged outside. Inside, rotten smells climbed on the back of rancid smells, it was filthy, beyond the corpse, the heat from the woodstove made it stink more, despite the smokiness.

Those eyes watched him. Stewart had an idea. With the front door pushed out, out as far as son could manage, forcing aside the heavy snow, the body dragged along the floor. The going was hard, but Stewart offered his best encouragement.

Night came early. The radio was dead for the moment and Cody heard the beasts. They used to come rooting through cans, cutting their snouts as they tasted civilized leftovers. Cody wanted to see them. He opened the door a crack and looked out.

Close enough to touch. Smoky white with blue eyes and grey eyes and long teeth, three wolves growled. The offspring of their current meal growled back.

Unthreatened, they resumed their feast.

Cody closed the door and felt something like disgust, something like sadness, but not quite either. Stewart suggested the radio to drown out the smacking and growling. Cody mocked Stewart’s fear, “Wolves, can’t open doors,” but cranked the radio into life anyway.

Winter was home. Cody had no way of knowing the date, understanding how long he’d have to wait, wait until the rains arrived and mother brought in a new load of cans. Stewart suggested that she might not come back. The wolves had eaten her, she’d become the food she was to fetch.

—

The canned food ran out and Cody waited, starving, he tried tree bark. It didn’t help and made him feel sickly. He ate the dead spider hanging in its web and it made him feel gross instead of full. Worse than the bark.

The winter blasted down and Cody looked to fetch wood from the bathhouse, not to eat, but to burn, bring the stove into life and be warm at least.

One piece left.

It didn’t last and Cody burned the stuffing from the couch, the couch legs, the books, the bookshelf, anything that might light but for the clothes on his back and the blankets covering him on his mother’s cot.

The wind whistled. Stewart promised spring. Cody’s teeth chattered, he was too cold to move and he slept through the final day of winter before the first of the rains came.

—

It was still cold, but he’d make it away. Stewart said the bad stuff couldn’t happen anymore since Celeste was gone. Couldn’t take him away from his mother when the wolves already did so. Those wolves broke the spell, ate up the evil in the world.

Cody opened the front door to get a snow meal and saw the cavernous torso. Dried and yet mucky in the melt. It looked so much like jerky on bone, it didn’t stink as it had, but…

An idea.

Stewart yelled from inside.

The bear was right. He couldn’t eat her. She might come back in him and bring along the evils. He ate his share of snow and went back inside, leaving the body as she was. Boys and wolves eat different things.

The rains continued through the night and the following afternoon it appeared he might be able to wheel the Jeep to the road.

He’d never driven before. He sat in the driver’s seat and waited, the Jeep refused to come to life. Stewart didn’t understand either and Cody was too tired to think about that thing he had to do to make it go. He crawled into the back, hoping against probability, wishing his mom would come with cans.

Cody cried and held his belly. He rolled off the seat and gazed into the shadows.

A miracle.

Three tall fries sat flimsy and filthy, frozen prior to greening, he gobbled the first two and savored the third. What seemed a blessing became a terror, his stomach grumbled for more, he scoured the car, searching for fries.

Three was his ration.

They offered will and energy.

After loading the layers—mother’s coat last—Cody set out. It was easy to follow the path, the snow was still high, but it was hard, mostly, and he only crunched through every tenth or eleventh step.

Stewart was chipper. The bear spoke of all the wonderful things to eat in town, while he encouraged every step.

—

A pack of wolves trailed at a distance, following the steps, calculating the chances, working the logistics. Wolves, the physicists of the wilderness buffet.

They crept at a boy’s pace, ready to dine, ready to dash.

—

Cody slowed. He was warm under the massive coat. He’d grown tired again and his feet dragged. Branches snapped around him, but he dared not turn. Stewart would tell him if something was wrong. After ninety minutes of staggering along the snowy trail, the choice came, the road in, the road out.

Please, baby, please, baby, the sound of his mother’s voice fluttered into his mind, he couldn’t place it. He saw rosy cheeks and dead eyes after lifting a cloud from heaven. That face was a stranger. A mother was a thing wolves ate.

Please, baby, please, baby.

—

The wolves watched the boy and his stuffed bear, licking their chops.

—

Cody looked left and looked right, unaware that to turn left meant to find humanity, find food, find a future, and to the right meant to find trees, find hungry teeth, find his end.

“Well, Stewart, what do you think? What way do we go?”

Stewart said he knew the way and Cody followed that direction.

XX